Wouter & Ymke 
In Dice Valley, the Long-Eared Kingdom and the Claw Horde are fighting for control of the forest. Their armies meet on the Great Meadow, ready to push forward, capture the enemy and eventually reach the other side. So far, fairly normal woodland warfare. Except your entire army consists of wooden dice.
And no, you won’t actually be rolling them. Instead, you tumble your dice across the board, changing their formations as they move. What initially looks like a fairly straightforward battle soon has you staring at cubes from several angles, trying to work out what they’ll become after their next move. Cute rabbits and foxes on the box, serious cube business on the table.
Dice Valley launches on Gamefound on 17 November. You can find the campaign here if you want to take a closer look or follow along before the launch.
👥 1-4 players, ages 8+
⌛ Playing time: 30 minutes
📝 Designers: Filip Kościuszko
🎨 Artwork: Dawid Wiącek
🏢 Publisher: Smart Flamingo (prototype copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
Each player controls six dice, representing either the Long-Eared Kingdom or the Claw Horde. Every die has the same six formations on its faces: warriors, flyers, brutes, mages, shooters and barricades. The symbol currently facing upwards is that die’s active formation, and each formation has its own capture zone.
Before starting, players take turns placing their dice on the castle spaces at their side of the board. Your six dice must all begin with different active formations, but you can choose how their side faces are oriented. There’s a recommended setup for your first game if you’d rather leave that decision for later.
On your turn, you choose one of your dice and tumble it once onto an adjacent empty space. You don’t pick it up and select the face you want. The die physically tips onto its next side, so moving also changes its active formation. Moving forwards, backwards or sideways can leave the same die showing completely different formations.
After tumbling a die, you first check whether it has entered an opponent’s capture zone. If it has, it’s removed from the board. If it survives, you check its own capture zone and remove any opposing dice inside it. A single move can capture more than one die. There are also a few specific interactions between formations, most notably that shooters can’t capture barricades.
There are two ways to win. You can capture your opponent’s final die, or get one of your own dice onto a victory space on their side of the board.
We mainly played the standard one-on-one game, though Dice Valley also includes rules for 2v2 and 2v1 games, using the small dots on some dice to divide control between players. There’s also a River and Bridges module. Without it, the river is just part of the artwork. Add the module and only warriors, flyers and mages can safely occupy a river space without a bridge. Other formations are immediately captured.
Artwork & Components
We played a prototype copy of Dice Valley, so components and other details may still change before the finished version.
The box is probably the most colourful part of the whole production. Rabbits, foxes, birds and other animals fill the illustration, with the two armies facing each other from opposite sides. There’s quite a bit tucked around the characters and borders when you look more closely. Once you’re actually playing, most of that woodland personality stays on the box. The board itself is much more functional.
The dice take over on the table. One army uses natural wooden dice and the other orange ones, all with large black formation symbols on their faces. They’re chunky, easy to handle and, more importantly, we could read them clearly from across the table. Some have small dots for the multiplayer variants. There’s also a green reference die showing how the six symbols are arranged in relation to each other. We used that more than I expected.
The board is compact, with castles at either end, victory spaces in front of them and the river crossing the middle. Player aids show all six capture patterns, and bridge tokens sit directly on the river when that module is being used. There isn’t much else competing for space. Most of the table is simply two groups of oversized dice facing each other across a field, which suits the game perfectly well.
Our Experience
Most of our games were one-on-one. The turn itself was easy to understand from the start, but reading the capture patterns took longer. Our first game involved plenty of moving a die, checking the player aid, looking back at the board and noticing something we’d missed. Flyers caught us out several times because their capture pattern wasn’t always where we instinctively expected it to be.
After a few games, the player aids spent much more time sitting untouched. We also stopped grabbing every capture that became available. Sometimes leaving an opposing die exactly where it was caused more trouble, especially if another move blocked a route or forced the other player to deal with a threat somewhere else. One side of the board could be developing nicely until something inconvenient appeared on the other and demanded attention.
There were plenty of traps that didn’t work quite as planned. One of us would leave a die apparently stuck, only for it to tumble out through an option we’d overlooked. More than once I was convinced a die had nowhere useful to go and then immediately watched it go somewhere useful. There’s not much to blame in those situations. No card draw, no unfortunate roll. The move was sitting there on the board the entire time.
We were also surprisingly reluctant to lose dice in our early games. It feels wrong to voluntarily give up part of your army, especially when eliminating the other army is one way to win. That changed once we started getting dice closer to the victory spaces. Losing one die could be perfectly acceptable if another suddenly had a route through. Fewer dice also meant fewer capture zones covering the board, so later stages could become much more open than the crowded positions we’d been dealing with earlier.
We added the River and Bridges module once we no longer needed to keep checking the basic capture patterns. The bridges became useful routes through the centre, and the river made the formation showing on top of a die matter in another way. We did, naturally, manage to forget that restriction occasionally and send something into the water that had no business being there. Woodland warfare apparently comes with swimming requirements.
Our Thoughts
I like that Dice Valley uses dice without asking you to roll them. The cube itself is part of the mechanism. A die’s position matters, but so does its orientation, and those two things don’t always cooperate. The shortest route towards an opponent might leave the wrong formation facing upwards. Moving sideways can be more useful if it prepares the face you want for the following turn. How you moved a die previously affects what you can do with it now.
That relationship between movement and orientation is the main reason the game worked for us. You’re looking at where a die should go and what it will become when it gets there. The best position and the best formation aren’t necessarily available from the same move. Add the victory spaces and simply having more dice than your opponent doesn’t tell you much about who’s actually in the better position.
Despite the woodland armies on the box, this is very much an abstract strategy game. The two factions don’t behave differently and there’s no randomness to change a bad position. If you make a mistake and your opponent spots it, that’s usually your problem. Experience also makes a noticeable difference. Someone who already knows the capture patterns and can picture how a die will change after tumbling has an obvious advantage over someone who’s still checking the player aid. I’d rather play against someone with roughly the same amount of experience than teach the game and immediately go for the throat.
My main issue is how easy it is to keep calculating instead of finally moving something. Once we knew the capture patterns, we could see more possible moves rather than fewer, particularly when most of the dice were still on the board. The rulebook includes an optional one-minute timer for experienced players, and I can see why. We didn’t use it. I’m also not sure I’d want to, as part of the appeal for us was being able to sit with a position for a bit. Depending on who’s playing, though, that bit could become quite a long bit.
What we can’t judge from our plays is how Dice Valley develops after dozens of games. Players have control over their starting formations and orientations, so I’m curious whether different openings will keep appearing or whether experienced players will settle on a few preferred setups. The same goes for the six formations. Right now they each found uses in our games, but we’d need far more plays to know whether that remains true once both players know the system inside out.
For now, I’m happy with where we ended up. Dice Valley gave us several games where a move we’d dismissed turned out to matter later, or where we finished and immediately went back to something we’d done a few turns earlier. We understood the board much better by the end than we did at the beginning, but we certainly didn’t feel finished with it. For a game built around moving wooden cubes across a meadow, that’s enough to make us want to put the armies back in their castles and have another go.
📝 We received a prototype copy of Dice Valley from Smart Flamingo. The game and its components were still in development at the time of our plays.
