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With 7 Wonders Dice, Antoine Bauza takes one of the most well-known civilization games and squeezes it into a roll-and-write. No cards, no drafting, just dice, pencils, and a city board that fills up faster than you’d expect.
To be honest, when I first heard “7 Wonders but with dice”, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Sometimes these compact versions feel like a summary more than a real game. Here, though, it quickly became clear that this isn’t just a shortcut version. It’s its own thing, and it asks slightly different questions from the original.
You’re still building an ancient city, still watching your neighbors, still balancing economy and points. But now everyone is working from the same dice, every turn, at the same time. That shared puzzle is really where most of the interesting decisions sit.
👥 2-7 players, ages 10+
⌛ Playing time: 25 minutes
📝 Designer: Antoine Bauza
🎨 Artwork: Agnès Ripoche
🏢 Publisher: Repos Production (review copy provided by Asmodee Belgium).
Gameplay overview
The game is played over a series of turns, each with two phases.
First, the dice in the forum are mixed. One player shakes the little box and reveals the dice. The forum is divided into four areas, and each area shows how many coins it costs to use a die sitting there. The dice stay in place for the whole turn, and everyone can choose from the same seven dice. More than one player can take the same die result, so there’s no fighting over individual dice.
Then everyone takes one action at the same time.
Most of the time, that action is building something in your city. You choose a die, pay its coin cost, and use the symbol on it to cross off a space on the matching building on your board. You have to follow the arrows shown on the board, so there’s no jumping ahead. Each space needs resources, which come from your warehouse and are permanent. If you’re short, you can pay coins to make up the difference. As soon as you cross something off, its effect applies straight away.
You can also work on your city’s wonder. Each city has its own wonder with three steps. You don’t need a die to build it, which makes it useful when the forum doesn’t give you anything you like. You just pay the cost, cross off the next space, and take the effect immediately. Wonders also score points at the end, so they’re never useless, even if they don’t always feel urgent.
The last option is passing. You do nothing, gain three coins, and move on. It sounds boring, but it’s part of the game. Sometimes you just don’t want to overpay for a bad die.
Once you complete all spaces of a building, you choose one of your available bonus spaces and cross it off, then apply its effect right away. Some buildings unlock special dice later in the game. When a player unlocks a special die for the first time, it replaces a random grey die in the forum at the end of the turn. Other players can’t use that die until they unlock it themselves.
Military works through direct comparison with your neighbors. When you cross off an attack space, you score points immediately, based on how much defense your neighbor had from earlier turns.
The game ends when one player completes three buildings. You finish the current turn, everyone gets one last turn, and then you add up points from buildings, wonders, military, and end-game effects.
Artwork, components, and usability
Visually, this is very much a 7 Wonders game. Bright colors, clear symbols, and city boards that look alive without being messy. Each board is full, but everything is where you expect it to be. Your economy sits at the bottom, your city grows upward, and once you know the symbols you rarely need the rulebook.
The dice are custom, colorful, and easy to read. Each face shows a symbol instead of a number, and those symbols match the boards well. After a game or two, reading the forum is quick and mostly painless.
The forum itself is a small box that holds and rolls the dice and shows the coin costs. It does its job and doesn’t pretend to be more than that.
That said, the dry-erase setup didn’t fully work for us. The pencils sometimes made very light marks, and at a quick glance it wasn’t always clear what had already been crossed off. Maybe this improves with different pens, but out of the box it felt a bit weak. After a lot of plays, I can imagine the boards getting harder to read.
Our experience
The biggest thing we noticed right away was the pace. Turns move fast because everyone acts at the same time. No waiting, no checking phones while someone else thinks. You look at the dice, make a decision, and mark your board.
In early games, people went for the obvious stuff. Military points, big coin effects, and anything that felt flashy. Warehouse upgrades and small permanent discounts didn’t look exciting, so they were often ignored at first. The wonder also felt like something you squeezed in when nothing better was available, rather than something you built toward on purpose.
Game length surprised new players. The game can end quickly once someone grabs three bonuses, sometimes before slower plans really get going. Early on, this made games feel abrupt. After a few plays, everyone became much more aware of how close that end trigger actually was.
With more experience, the special dice started to matter a lot more. Once the black, white, and purple dice entered play, the game opened up. Strategies became more specific, and turns felt less scripted by the basic dice alone.
Military also changed character over time. Early attacks could score well before defenses appeared. Later on, even small defensive investments made military a lot less attractive. It ended up feeling like something you use when the timing is right, not something you rely on every game.
Our thoughts
Truth be told, 7 Wonders Dice is more about adjusting than planning. If you come in with a fixed strategy, you’ll probably get annoyed. The game rewards players who watch the table, manage their coins well, and react to what the dice offer instead of forcing things.
Economy turned out to matter more than it first appears. Getting your warehouse and coin income in shape makes the whole game calmer. You stop stressing about expensive dice and start seeing options instead of problems.
Other routes can work, but they’re riskier. Early military can pay off, but only if neighbors leave gaps. Rushing the university gives flexibility, but costs a lot upfront. In our games, the most stable results came from mixing a solid economy with one or two focused scoring paths, plus military only when it made sense.
The ability to end the game on your terms also became important. If you’re ahead, pushing for that third bonus can lock the game before others catch up. If you’re behind, you really feel how little control you sometimes have over stopping it. That part won’t be for everyone.
The boards themselves are busy. Everything you need is there, but it’s not light. If someone expects an easy family game because the box is small, they might be surprised. The tactics are manageable, but the long-term decisions take time to learn.
For us, 7 Wonders Dice feels like a solid, slightly demanding roll-and-write that respects the original game without copying it blindly. It’s interactive without being mean, fast without being shallow, and keeps you thinking right until the end. Not perfect, not for everyone, but it stays interesting longer than I expected. And yes, you’ll probably finish most games thinking you were just one good turn away.
📝 We received a copy of the game from Asmodee Belgium.
As a small extra note: Asmodee Belgium is running a campaign around several of its games at the moment, including the 7 Wonders range. If you buy the game locally through a participating store, you can enter a giveaway for a trip to Athens. The same promotion also applies to Ticket To Ride, with a chance to win a trip to London, and Azul, which is linked to a trip to Lisbon. It’s one of those “nice if it happens” extras rather than a reason to buy the game, but I thought it was worth mentioning here at the end. If you’re curious, more information is on Asmodee Belgium’s site.
