Tag: Re-rolling and Locking

Fortify

| OTSG Staff

It’s a hot summer and you see a new family just moved in across the street and you know what that means, boxes! You round up your friends and a giant bag of water balloons. You quickly split into teams, start stacking boxes, and fill your water balloons because everyone knows its time to Fortify!

Use the variety of boxes (Cards) to create a closed wall around your Base. The larger you make it the more friends can fit inside. The more friends you have the faster you can build or the more water balloons (Dice) you can toss at your opponent’s fort. Roll well and land your water balloons on boxes, rival friends, and ultimately their base to claim the day and the pride of the neighborhood!

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • ~2 Players
  • 15 – 30 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.50

Dice Throne: Outcasts

| OTSG Staff

Dice Throne is a combat game, whether 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, 2v2v2, or free-for-all. Select from a variety of heroes that play and feel completely distinct from one another. Attack opponents and activate abilities by rolling your hero’s unique set of five dice. Accumulate combat points and spend them on cards that have a large range of effects, such as granting permanent hero upgrades, applying status effects, and manipulating dice directly whether yours, your teammate’s, or even your opponent’s.

Outcasts is the newest edition of the Dice Throne universe introducing 4 new heroes: Pale Lady, Headless Horseman, Raveness, Necromancer.

Game Mechanics:

  • Dice Rolling
  • Re-rolling and Locking
  • Take That
  • Variable Player Powers

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 6 Players
  • 20 – 40 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.15

Dragon Farkle

| OTSG Staff

Gather your courage! The long-enjoyed peace of Yon has been disrupted by a ferocious and mean-spirited dragon — he’s terrorizing the locals and eating their livestock without their permission! Fortunately, a few wannabe heroes (that’s you!) have risen to the challenge of slaying the beast. Get yourself a brave companion, gather a powerful army, and enter the Dragon’s Keep for cheese and country in Dragon Farkle!

To play, you gather an army of loyal soldiers or steal them from your opponents, hire suspicious-looking companions and gain allegedly useful items (most of which aren’t even cursed), then fight that dragon you’ve heard so much about — or don’t, if you hate winning…

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 5 Players
  • ~30 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.45

Deep Regrets

| OTSG Staff

Deep Regrets is an unfortunate fishing game about pulling progressively more horrifying things out of the ocean. Decide what to eat, what to sell, what to mount, and how many regrets you’re willing to carry, as you push yourself too far and spiral towards a conclusion in this strategic horror fishing game.

You’ll roll bespoke tackle dice at the start of each turn to determine your strength for that round and then decide whether you’ll stay at sea or return to port to sell fish, buy provisions, and recharge your energy.

Survey the sizes of shadows on the backs of 9 different fish shoals at three depths, determining what you think you can afford to catch and if you want to risk it for a potentially better reward. Flip fish, spend dice, add them to your collection – but beware of reveal and catch abilities that can have various effects on the game! As your eyes spy more and more horrifying things, you’ll collect Regrets cards – which drive up your madness but also give you access to more dice and increase the value of weirder fish. It’s a risk/reward scenario as you balance your madness, knowing that at the end of the game the player with the highest value of Regrets will have to discard their most valuable mounted fish.

Manage you resources, make strategic decisions, leverage madness to your benefit and suppress your Regrets as you try to catch the most valuable haul of weirder and weirder fish in this weird week at sea.

SOLO MODE:
In the solo mode (which you can also co-op), you’ll act as an ichthyologist on a mission to catch and catalog every fish in the sea. Over a campaign of dozens of games, you’ll try to reel in every last fish and document their attributes on provided catalog sheet. At the end of each game, you’ll have to discard an equal value of fish to the regrets you’ve collected and may have to let some fish go to return to another day. At the end of the campaign, you’ll have a catalog of all fish names, depths, values and difficulties that can be used by players in the multiplayer game to help identify what they might fish up!

—description from the designer

Game Mechanics:

  • Cooperative Game
  • Push Your Luck
  • Re-rolling and Locking
  • Set Collection
  • Solo / Solitaire Game

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 5 Players
  • 30 – 150 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.35

Clever Cubed

| OTSG Staff

Clever Cubed is a fun dice rolling game, where you’ll carefully choose dice to place them in matching colored areas to hopefully create chain-scoring opportunities! But be careful when you go big – your opponents can use your discarded dice if their value is lower than your chosen dice. May the cleverest player win!

Game Mechanics:

  • Dice Rolling
  • Paper and Pencil
  • Re-rolling and Locking
  • Solo / Solitaire Game

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • ~30 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.38

Artifacts, Inc.

| OTSG Staff

New York, 1929: A frenzy of interest in antiquity is sweeping the nation! With museums hungry for mysterious and exotic artifacts — and you hungry for adventure — you start up your own archeology company. Untold wonders await within dangerous jungles, harsh deserts, and wind-swept mountains. Will you gain a reputation as the most intrepid and famous adventurer of all time?

In Artifacts, Inc., 2-4 players compete to grow the most famous archaeology company. Players roll dice, which represent their troop of adventurers, and place them on cards in order to find artifacts, sell them to museums, and purchase new cards representing their company assets. Players can choose to focus on making lots of money by selling artifacts, having museum majorities, creating the best combination of expeditions and buildings, or searching below the waves for lost cities and hidden treasures. The first player to reach 20 reputation triggers the end of the game, and the player with the most total reputation wins!

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • ~60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.16

Cult of the Deep

| OTSG Staff

You are a cultist, trying to establish your faction’s rise to power. Fight over rituals and mythical monsters as you seek victory and control of the cult.

Roles

Each player is given a role that will remain hidden throughout the game, except the High Priest. This role will determine your win condition:

  • High Priest – Root out corruption in the cult. Kill all Cabalists, the Heretic, and survive.
  • Cabalists – Seek to take control of the cult. Kill the High Priest.
  • Faithful – Protect the High Priest from threats to their power. Kill all Cabalists, the Heretic, and the High Priest must survive.
  • Heretic – Burn the whole cult to the ground. Kill the entire cult, yourself included if necessary.

Extra abilities

Each player will also be given a:

  • Character card that determines their starting health, special ability, and a power symbol that provides an additional way to gain life from the dice.
  • Secret sigil card, which gives each cultist a once per game power, will also be given to each player.

Mechanics

A player will take a turn by first rolling their dice up to 3 times. They then decide where to commit their dice: to rituals to gain altar effects to temporarily empower themselves, finish a ritual in order to gain its powerful effects permanently, stab other cultists, gain life, or give life to other cultists.

If a player is killed, they are not eliminated. Instead, they become a wraith. They will roll dice on their turn still, just less. They cannot commit dice like normal but instead haunt the dice of enemies and allies by giving, replacing, or discarding dice.

Game Mechanics:

  • Bribery
  • Deduction
  • Hidden Roles
  • Push Your Luck
  • Re-rolling and Locking
  • Team-Based Game
  • Variable Player Powers

Game Specifications:

  • 4 – 8 Players
  • 45 – 75 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.71

Glow

| OTSG Staff

In Glow, you are an adventurer who builds their company by recruiting a new traveling companion each turn, trying to combine their powers as best as possible. You’ll roll the dice to activate the advantages that your companions bring you…or their disadvantages. Gather many slivers of light to dispel the darkness, restore the colors, travel the land to reach landmarks, and (yes) score points.

In short, Glow is a card-drafting, dice-rolling, and combinations game. The box contains lots of colorful dice, two game boards for two different gaming experiences. You have also to count on luck sometimes, but be attentive to your card combinations, too.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • ~45 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.05

Elder Sign

| OTSG Staff

It is 1926, and the museum’s extensive collection of exotic curios and occult artifacts poses a threat to the barriers between our world and the elder evils lurking between dimensions. Gates to the beyond begin to leak open, and terrifying creatures of increasing strength steal through them. Animals, the mad, and those of more susceptible minds are driven to desperation by the supernatural forces the portals unleash. Only a handful of investigators race against time to locate the eldritch symbols necessary to seal the portals forever. Only they can stop the Ancient One beyond from finding its way to Earth and reducing humanity to cinders.

Elder Sign is a fast-paced, cooperative dice game of supernatural intrigue for one to eight players by Richard Launius and Kevin Wilson, the designers of Arkham Horror. Players take the roles of investigators racing against time to stave off the imminent return of the Ancient One. Armed with tools, allies, and occult knowledge, investigators must put their sanity and stamina to the test as they adventure to locate Elder Signs, the eldritch symbols used to seal away the Ancient Ones and win the game.

To locate Elder Signs, investigators must successfully endure Adventures within the museum and its environs. A countdown mechanism makes an Ancient One appear if the investigators are not quick enough. The investigators must then battle the Ancient One. A clever and thematic dice mechanism pits their exploration against monsters and the sheer difficulty of staying sane and healthy, all within the standard game duration of one to two hours.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 8 Players
  • ~90 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.34

Dice Throne: Season One

| OTSG Staff

Dice Throne is a game of intriguing dice, tactical card play, powerful heroes, and unique abilities.

It’s a fast-paced 2-6 player combat game (1v1, 2v2, 3v3, 2v2v2, or free-for-all). Select from a variety of heroes that play and feel completely distinct from one another. Attack opponents and activate abilities by rolling your hero’s unique set of five dice. Accumulate combat points and spend them on cards that have a large range of effects, such as granting permanent hero upgrades, applying status effects, and manipulating dice directly (yours, your teammate’s, or even your opponent’s).

Game Mechanics:

  • Dice Rolling
  • Re-rolling and Locking
  • Take That
  • Team-Based Game
  • Variable Player Powers

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 6 Players
  • 20 – 40 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.07