After receiving Dice Throne Season one a few weeks ago, we got completely sucked in to the game and we absolutely love it. So if you are reading this and are considering to buy any game of Dice Throne, beware of the consequences for your wallet! For we not only bought Season One, but after that also Season Two and eventually also Dice Throne Adventures out of enthusiasm. Our wallet does not like us anymore…
For anyone who does not know Dice Throne. Season one and two provide a total of 16 characters (8 per season) that you can choose from to play against each other. If you are curious how this works, check out the review we wrote about Dice Throne Season One Rerolled.
Dice Throne adventures however completely changes the game into a cooperative exploration tile combat board game. The brilliance of this game is that you can use all the characters from season one or two. Needless to say, we are excited!
How to Play.
Before you start Dice Throne adventures, make sure you have played a battle with characters from either season one or two from Dice Throne as a lot of rules are the same with some modifications and it also will give you a better idea with who you like to play the most and what heroes work well together. To start your adventure, each player picks the character they want to play with and take out their tray as normal. If you start your campaign follow the steps in the rulebook set up as it is very well explained and showed with pictures.
You will always start your adventure from the portal and you will have to find all the portal shards spread around the map in order to travel trough the boss portal and confront the final boss of the scenario. You will start your adventure with three salves that you can use at the beginning of your turn, before a battle starts or before your upkeep phase. If you use a salve, you will heal your hero the amount indicated at the bottom of the scenario card. You can also use it to revive any fallen hero but your own, and bring them back to one health. After the salves, you can move. Your hero must travel trough previously explored tiles until they reach an unexplored tile or an ongoing minion battle. If you explore a tile, collect possible items placed on top of the tile, like portal shards, loot chests or salves. Then place the tile face up. Increase your gold or CP amount if indicated on the tile and deal with the mandatory or optional choices you face. This could be discarding a random card from your hand, or gaining a salve for example. Then draw and reveal a minion card with the level depending on the color of the minion icon on the revealed tile.
Once you reveal a random minion tile, your hero is engaged in battle. The minion card will tell you how much health the minion has, what abilities it has, possible rewards and what roll objective it will go for. Before the battle begins, you can spend a salve to heal yourself. After that, if the minion does not has first strike, you can resolve a complete hero step as normal. Meaning you resolve an upkeep phase, income phase, main phase, offensive roll phase, defensing roll phase, second main phase and discard phase. More detailed rules for these phases can be found in the rulebook of season one and season two. Then the minion will take it’s turn. The teammate who’s turn was before you, should play the minion. The minion also has an upkeep phase, but it skips the income and main phase as minions do not need CP because they don’t have cards. In the offensive roll phase, your teammate will try and roll the roll objective in three times and then resolve the best abilities from the minion to attack your hero. Remember that you can always use cards to alter the results. If the attack is defensible your hero may defend in the defend phase and if you are both still alive after that, the turn ends. Any teammates who want to help, can now travel to the battle if they are not engaged in battle themselves. The minion will take turns to attack each hero. If you defeat a minion, the player who strikes last can roll a loot die to see what loot they have earned on the loot chart. This could be health, gold, salves, or even unrevealed upgrade cards for your heroes deck.
If any hero’s health is reduced to zero and you have no salves to revive them, you have lost the scenario. Once you have collected all the portal shards and defeated the level four minion that is guarding the boss portal, you have won the campaign scenario meaning you will face the boss next. After a campaign scenario you will have collected gold to spend at the shop. At the shop you can either reveal the hidden cards you have collected, or buy the cards dealt to you when you win or lose the scenario. You can also sell cards that you have bought previously. When you are ready to battle one of the many bosses you will face, carefully follow the set up in the rulebook. It is thankfully very similar to you own hero’s setup. After the boss is ready to fight, you can on the beginning of each round choose to spend salves for six health. In the campaign mode, every hero has it’s own amount of health, but when facing a boss, you share your health. The boss card will tell you exactly how much health you will have with how many players. After the salves, the first players may resolve a full hero step. Then the boss will attack back with a few exceptions.
Resolve the upkeep phase like normal, then proceed to the income phase. The boss will get one CP every income phase and he will take a card from his action deck. If he has enough CP, the boss will use that card to attack the heroes. If there are any bonuses on the action cards from the boss, the active hero may immediately take this bonus. If the action card is for the main phase, the boss will use it now, otherwise he will use it in the offensive roll phase. The card will also tell you the roll objective for each round, whether the boss has bought it or not. Your teammate will get three tries to reach the roll objective and the boss will then perform the highest possible attack on his player board. If the attack is defendable, your hero may defend. Then the turn ends and the next hero may attack the boss. The boss will always attack the hero that is active.
Every boss will also start with a certain amount of King’s hand tokens. If the boss fails to roll for any ability, he can attempt to use a King’s hand token. The boss card will tell you how the boss can activate the tokens, how many he will start with and how many he can spend in one turn. If the token is successfully activated, the boss may perform another offensive roll phase. The boss can also attempt to use a King’s hand token when you want to perform an ultimate attack against him. When successfully activated, your hero has to reroll one die. You will win the battle when the boss if defeated and lose if your heroes lose their health. After the battle, whether you have lost or won, every hero will get the rewards indicated on the boss card.
Playthrough of the game.
We died, many times in fact. It was when we started playing that we understood how different this game is compared to PvP and how important it is what combination of heroes you pick. But we finally completed our first run trough the first campaign scenario and boss fight with the Vampire Lord and Seraph and decided these were the heroes for us. With Tomasz playing the Vampire Lord, he can steal blood and heal, but also attack and inflict bleed on opponents. And I like to play Seraph because Tomasz can be a little impatient which results in him attacking to fast sometimes, and with Seraph I can heal not only myself, but also other teammates. But she attacks well to. Every hero has their own play style and attacks and it’s up to you to see which hero you like the best. The Vampire lord saved us more then a couple of times because it has a skill that if you active it, she can heal herself up to the amount of damage you cause. Which means if you roll a high attack, or modify it with cards, she will not only cause all that damage, but also heal a significant amount. We did notice that some characters are unbalanced. Some characters can just heal much more, or avoid damage much better. Whenever we picked a character who couldn’t heal or avoid or get health back in any way, it would just die causing you to lose the scenario.
That being said, Dice Throne really has something for everyone and the quality of the components are excellent. The possibilities are almost endless as you pick up random tiles, minions, items, cards and you choose your own heroes. So if you have won the complete campaign once and decide to play entirely different heroes, the game will feel totally different again. You also power up your hero’s card deck with loot cards that you find during the campaign, making it even more diverse and fun. We also found that the attacks from minions and bosses are well designed. You always know what roll objective you have and what attack they will choose so that you can’t manipulate the game or don’t know what you need to do. We still haven’t finished the full campaign since it’s definitely not an easy game and a little luck based, but we are getting there and are enjoying every moment.
Final Thoughts.
Dice Throne Adventures is a cooperative tiled placed battle game where you fight with dices and cards versus minions and bosses. As you level up your character trough the game you will face many dangers in the campaign. We think Dice Throne adventures is a brilliant designed game with a lot of replayability. You will need season one or two of Dice Throne to play Dice Throne Adventures since the seasons provide the characters, but the way every thing fits together and how smooth the gameplay is, makes this game so much fun. While it’s very easy to learn, it’s not so easy to defeat the entire campaign, but we always like a challenge. We love Dice Throne and it’s in our top three favorite games at the moment.
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