Daniel Solis

Last year a lot of publishers said they liked my games, but wanted to see what I'd do next . Specifically, what games I could design beyond the realm of pure card games. Something like a medium weight euro.  So as I do my morning game design doodles, I'm dipping a toe into classic euro mechanisms like worker placement or dice placement. Here's one idea, loosely inspired by Greg Stolze's One-Roll Engine . Assume there is a pool of eight six-sided dice and a board with six numbered spaces. Also assume that this board represents six different actions you may take, in the spirit of other dice-placement games like Alien Frontiers, Kingsburg, or Euphoria. On your turn, you roll the dice pool and sort the results into groups according to their face value. Here we have 1x1, 2x3, 3x2, 4x1, and 5x1. As the active player, you get first choice from this pool to place one of these groups onto the board. You may place a group onto a space that matches the face value ...

I had the pleasure of playing Eric Zimmerman's Quantum last night. It has some very clever abstract mechanics that make it easy to learn and adds plenty of thematic add-ons that greatly expand the tactical options in later turns. Highly recommended. At the core of Quantum's system is an elegant balance between speed and strength. The die face represents how many spaces a ship may move, so a 6 ("Scout) speeds across the board very quickly. However, combat is resolved by adding the number on your ship to a 1d6 roll. The lower total wins, with attacker winning on ties. So a 1 ("Battlestation") is very strong, but cannot move very fast. All other mechanics are built around this skeleton. It got me thinking about other dice-placement games in recent years that incorporated some clever mechanics, notably Kingsburg and Alien Frontiers. Auctions have been on my mind, too, particularly auctions that work well with two players. (Folks on Twitter had several recomm...

Here's a silly idea. What would happen if you took all the worker-placement spaces of the Lords of Waterdeep board and made them dice faces instead? Download this PDF and try it out at home. The doc includes sticker templates for 16mm dice and big chunky print-and-fold paper dice. Print a set of dice for each player. Here are the tweaks to the original game: There is no board. Place all decks, quest cards and building tiles on a central play area. There are agents but they're not used in the traditional manner. Players just have a number of turns in the round equal to their agents. So, players may have agents leftover at the end of the round. On your turn, you may play an agent onto another player's building, roll your dice or accept the previous player's offer (see below). When you use another player's building, put your agent on that building as normal. Any buildings or intrigue cards that allow you to copy another player's actions work as norm...

The "roll-and-move" category of games often gets bad rap. Sure, they're often the first games we learn as kids. And for a long time, there was a glut of games that used the mechanic any further thought to the design. Perhaps there's also just a strain of bitterness because that's the extent of what the vast majority of people imagine a board game being: Simply rolling, moving, and following instructions wherever you landed. Whatever the reasons, I think the stigma is unfair. The mechanic is just a neutral tool, either used well or used poorly, but has its strengths and weaknesses inherent in itself. Listening to this episode of Ludology got me thinking about ways to add just a little spice to some mass-market roll-and-move games like Monopoly and Life . First, you'll need one die for each player. Determine initial turn order randomly. Before anyone takes a turn, roll all the dice. The first player takes one result out of the pool and moves that m...

While I was looking at Triple Triad in the Final Fantasy games, I stumbled across another card-based mini-game. This one is called Pazaak, found in the Star Wars video game Knights of the Old Republic. The goal of the game is similar to Blackjack, in that you want to play cards such that their sum is as close to 20 as possible without going over. The twist is that you have your own supply of cards, as does your opponent, and there is a randomized deck of "neutral" cards. Player cards have various ranks in negative and positive values. Neutrals are always positive. There are also special cards which double your previous card, flip between positive pr negative, and so on. See the tutorial above for more info. I got to thinking about how this would work with dice. Your goal is still trying to reach a sum of 20 without going over, using a combination of your own dice and randomly rolled neutral dice. Here's how to play. First, give each player a supply of dice an...

Last week I played Guilds of Cadwallon for the first time. It's a very elegant tactical game with some clever nooks and crannies. You can check it out in the video above. It actually reminded me of Triple Triad , an old digital game from the Final Fantasy series that I've occasionally tried to hack into an analog format. Anyway, here's a simple dice-based game you can play. Each player starts with an equal number of d6s, in their own color. To start the game, players roll all of their dice at once and leave the results as they stand. On your turn, take one die from the supply (of either color) and place it on the table adjacent (up, down, left, right, not diagonal) to another die thus forming a grid of dice. The round ends when all dice have been placed. Then points are earned by surrounding an opponent's die with your die results totaling a number greater than your opponent's die result. Only orthogonal (up, down, left, right) adjacencies are consider...

I'm still developing the dice game Noodle Roll when I get a rare moment. I'm eager to put the beta prototype through its paces before I really let it out into the wild. For the moment it's looking like a potential print-on-demand release, depending on whether that market would be willing to provide their own tokens and dice. Here are the details so far: » Original pitch » Further notes on revising the theme Now I've settled on a few key elements that would make it more marketable for a POD/DriveThruCards release. Each table is a card. During setup, you randomly draw a certain number of three-tops, two-tops and one-top tables to make the board. Each diner is still represented by a die face, as shown in previous blog posts, but they also have one, two, or three spaces in front of them. These spaces represent the diner ordering one, two or three courses for their meal. Thus, a diner with two or three spaces may be served two or three times. This makes the game...

Earlier this week I described how Lyndsay Peters and I got to talking about a little dice game inspired by my misinterpretation of a key rule in Martian Dice. After discussing several different themes, we settled on noodle-making. Here's the full game as it stands now. We're calling it Noodle Roll . OVERVIEW Players take turns rolling dice several times, keeping sets ("strands") of three or more identical faces, and scoring based on the face value of those sets, plus any bonuses. As play continues, the board’s columns get filled. When two columns are filled, the game ends. SETUP The game supports 2-4 players. The group shares a supply of 13 standard six-sided dice. Each player has a supply of cubes in her own color. Each player gets three Sous-Chefs cards. I imagine a different sous-chef on each card. The face shows the sous-chef standing at attention, ready to take orders. The back shows the sous-chef hard at work making a noodle dish. I'd l...

Yesterday morning Lyndsay Peters and I played Martian Dice via Google Hangout, which is when I discovered that I have been playing it incorrectly this whole time. I thought if you wanted to capture humans, you had to capture them before cows and chickens. If you captured cows or chickens first, you couldn't capture humans in a later turn. However, you could capture as many cows or chickens as you liked until you busted a roll or ended your turn. This wasn't the case at all, as it turns out. You may capture humans, cows and chickens in any order you like, but you couldn't take one type if you had done so earlier. I'm still not sure how I got that so wrong. I think it's because there was a line break in the sentence explaining that rule. But really, it's just silly how wrong I got that. Sheesh! There are no rules so short and clear that everyone will follow them as intended. In fact, the shorter rules are just as prone to misinterpretation. But on the...

Back in 2011, I posted this simple push-your-luck dice game called Bombs Away that could be played with one die. I soon discovered some similarities to a 1994 casino-themed dice game called Sharp Shooters , which was later reimplemented by Ravensburger as Royal Casino and Temptation . The basic mechanic still appeals to me, though I've since taken as a personal challenge not to design any games with violent or combat themes. So, the bomb has to go. Curious about alternate "ticking timebomb" metaphors would work with this mechanic, I kind of like the image of a mystery egg. Players are taking turns sitting on an egg until it hatches. The longer you sit on the egg, the more claim you have over it, but what comes out of the egg may not be what you expect! The egg is represented by one d6. You roll the die to sit on the for one day and place one of your colored cubes in an open space beside the result. 1     [   ]     2     [   ] ...

Over the past year, I've posted numerous game ideas in various stages, but all have been considered "in the lab" because they're really not ready for prime time. I just wanted to share my thoughts a bit. Next year I'm ready to actually see some of these ideas come to fruition. Here's a pretty comprehensive list of ideas posted to this blog in 2012. Games to Prototype and Test These are games which are to the point where I could make a prototype and actually test at some point. Dung and Dragons /Dragon Ranch has been a long-simmering theme: Hippie co-op farmers raising dragons for their valuable poop. I finally cracked a cool mechanic for this idea, it just needs to get tested and refined. I'm really excited about how these simultaneous actions could interact with each other in unpredictable ways. Wine Collector : This was an experiment in deduction game design. Not sure how well it's actually going to work in practice, but I definitely like the...

Folks ask me all the time where I get game ideas, whether it's mechanics first or theme first. Sometimes it's a little of both, as we'll see here. One of my favorite recent mechanics comes from Doug Bass' Garden Dice . In that game you roll four dice to plant crops on a 6x6 gridded plot of land. The dice tell you the coordinates of where you may plant. You can do other actions based on the remaining two dice results. Choosing which dice to use in which capacity is a big part of the long-term strategy. So I spent yesterday thinking a few ways to use this basic skeleton for other purposes, the first of which is a dice-based resource acquisition game. This begins without a theme, but in exploring the mechanics, we start to see how a theme naturally emerges. Play centers on a 6x6 grid from which you can acquire resources: A, B, C, D, E, and F. The intersections of each row and column show combinations of two resources and double-resources along the diagonal from to...

I had the good fortune of playing Divinare last weekend. ("Fortune." Get it?) It's about old-timey psychics competing to prove who's the real deal. It's a clever little deduction game with an element of take-that and push-your-luck in one elegant package. As much as I love Cards-with-Numbers , I'm especially fascinated with cards that only feature art and no other game information. I'll do a post on that soon. Check out Tom Vasel's review of Divinare for details of how to play. The experience reminds me a lot of playing the classic game Liar's Dice. If you haven't played that, you should too. Here are the basic rules as I play them at home. Note that there are numerous variants, I just happen to like this one. Each player has five standard dice and dice cups for concealment. Each round, each player rolls their dice under their cups. Each player looks at their results in secret. The first player guesses out loud a quantity and a face...

Based on the math feedback from Mark Sherry, I made some changes to the core rules of Picker . Mainly this involved resolving this strange bug where being a Picker was actually more detrimental to each player's score. Based on the revised rules, the simulations show that being a Picker gives you a slight percentile advantage, which better fits the spirit of the game. Here are the basic changes: The dice are different colors, which are now the basis of set bonuses, independent of the results. There is no more SHAFT role. It was actually a greater detriment to all AIs and led to lower final scores. The PICKER role always picks herself to be first player. Again, this balanced out the anti-picker bug a bit and streamlined the rules. The set bonus is streamlined to a linear +3, with a maximum of +15 for a set of 6-of-a-kind. Clarified that you can score bonus points for multiple sets, so long as each are a different color. I've updated the main page with these new rule...

Here's a super simple pub game to play with normal dice, inspired by the customized dice drafting mechanic in Seasons. It's so simple, in fact, that I could fit all the rules onto one graphic. Neat, eh? 3 or more Players 5-10 Minutes EACH ROUND SETUP Roll 1d6 per player. Each die is a different color. Resolving Ties: If all the dice come up with the same result, roll them all again until there is at least one different result. In the first round, youngest player goes first. Thereafter, each round's turn order changes. ON YOUR TURN Keep one result. Score that many points. Keep track of your chosen color each round. If you are first to keep the lowest result, you will be first player in the next round. Clarification:   If there are ties for the lowest result, only the first player to keep that result gets this effect. For example, if there are two 1s, and you keep a 1 first, then you're the Picker. Whoever keeps the second 1 gets no benefit. Turns...

Here's another odd dice idea I tweeted last weekend. Assume you're playing a story game. Assume that each turn, players state one thing that they want to change in the story, using their characters as the means of change. And also assume that each turn, the active player will get a graduating range of complication on her stated actions. This range is drawn from a pair of d6 dice results, ranging from 2-12. 2 is the most complications, 12 is the fewest complications. The most common result is 6 or 7, which represent just a few complications. Here's the trick: You actually roll three dice on your turn. After rolling, you choose which two dice to keep as your official results. Then you pass the third dice result to the next player for their turn. He then rolls two dice and now has to choose among the three results: Those two he just rolled and the one result you gave him. If he takes your result, you earn a point. If he doesn't take your result, it passes to the ne...

Here's a solo dice puzzle for you. It's an oddly hypnotic way to spend a few minutes before giving up in frustration. Setup Gather a block of 36 dice. Roll a die. Place it on the table. On Your Turn ... Roll a die. Place it adjacent to a die already on the table. Gradually, you'll create a branching dice formation. As soon as you create a contiguous chain of 3 or more with matching results, remove all the matching dice in that chain. Chains do not count diagonally adjacent dice. Only vertically and horizontally adjacent dice count. Restrictions 1. Your formation can't extend past a 6x6 grid. Note: There is no board. The overall formation of dice simply can't extend taller or wider than 6 dice. Thus, the first die you place is technically the center. As you add or remove dice, the outerbounds of your formation can shift dramatically. Indeed, over time, the formation may seem to crawl like an amoeba over the table. 2. You may not remove any dice that wo...

A dice game inspired by the stock market (and playing lots of Martian Dice). Roll a bunch of dice and choose which sets to keep. Choose your strategy wisely! Stuff You Need Two-to-Six PLAYERS A PENCIL and PAPER to keep score Thirteen standard six-sided DICE How to Play The shortest player takes the first turn. On your turn, first roll all thirteen dice. Several dice will have matching results. These are called SETS. (A single die result is a set, too.) You must choose a set to keep. For example, your first roll results are 111124445555 . The sets are four 1 s, one 2 , three 4 s, and four 5 s. After keeping a set of dice, lock them up in a row. This is called the GOOD TRACK. For example,  you could keep the set of four 1 s, one 2 , three 4 s, or four 5 s . You decide to keep the four 1 s and line them up in your good track. After keeping a set, you may end your turn or re-roll the remaining unlocked dice. When you re-roll, immediately set aside any results tha...