Daniel Solis

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...

Last week I posted Noodle Roll, which had a lot of clever thematic elements like creating "strands" of identical dice results or employing sous-chefs to compensate for sub-optimal rolls. Where that theme fell down was in the big group board. Exciting. What the heck is this supposed to be anyway? Mechanically speaking, the board featured columns and rows of spaces in which you were to place cubes. Pairs of horizontally adjacent cubes in the same color-coded area granted you a 10pt bonus. One area had three columns, enough room for two pairs. The middle area had only two columns, room for one pair. The last area had only one column, meaning there was no room for any pairs. When I came up with this board, I didn't really bother thinking about a thematic reason for its layout at the time. I just liked the clever adjacency mechanic. I hand-waved that these areas represented restaurants with broad or specialized menus. You played workers at a noodle factory delivering...

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...