Base price: $35.
1 – 4 players.
Play time: 20 – 30 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 2 

Full disclosure: A review copy of Dice Miner was provided by Atlas Games.

Alright, so this might be the closest I’ve gotten to being ahead on reviews in months, which is extremely exciting. Granted, I’m about to blow it all up and go to BGG.CON and then PAX Unplugged and then visit my family and then it’s the holidays, so this is but a fleeting emotion, but boy howdy is it good while it’s fleeting. You gotta appreciate the moments while you have them. I’ve had some weird personal stuff that I’ll be vague about come up recently that’s taken up a ton of my attention. Nothing bad, just, the kind of thing that takes up your attention for a while. So my mind’s been elsewhere other than board games lately. It happens. But in the meantime, there’s always more games to write about, so let’s talk about Dice Miner!

In Dice Miner, after years of peace, the dragons have returned to do dragon stuff like immolating people you know and like, so you need to turn to the mines to get what you need to stop them. Whether it’s magic for magic reasons or treasure for treasure reasons or beer for pretty obvious reasons, there are a whole lot of dwarves descending on the mine and only so much mine to go around. Naturally, there’s a perfectly reasonable ordering to all of this, so you’ll collectively start at the top and work your way down, adding the items you find within to your hoard. Over three rounds, you’ll do this, score points, and then refill the mine to try again and see what you can dig up. The challenge isn’t just in what you’ve taken; it’s that what you take can get rerolled between rounds and potentially give you new strategies and new headaches. Will you be able to dig deep and get the points you need?

Contents

• Player Count Differences
• Strategy
• Pros, Mehs, Cons
• Overall

Player Count Differences

A lot of drafting games (games where players each take turns taking something from a shared central resource, like Dice Miner), tend to play one of two ways: with fewer players they either reduce the size of the drafting pool, keeping scores fairly consistent across player counts, or they don’t, and points tend to rise pretty aggressively at two-player games. Dice Miner is in the latter camp: with every game, no matter the player count, the mountain will always have twenty dice on it. What this means for you, the player, is that scores can swing a lot at higher player counts, since you can have a lot more dice (and a lot more dice can end up not going your way, depending on how things shake out). If you’re playing a bit more conservatively, having more dice can be a useful way to get the Magic Dice that let you reroll problematic dice, which can be pretty helpful. At higher player counts, you really have to make the dice you have work for you. This can be useful, though! For instance, if you get an early enough lead on Treasure Dice, you don’t have to worry about maintaining that comfortable lead for a while, since they’ll end up distributing out among players. Beyond that, though, there’s not really a huge difference in gameplay; you may find some players fighting for Treasure majorities, but that’ll happen at any player count. It is nice to have other players to give Beer to, though, so three works a bit better than two, in my experience.

Strategy

• Take stock of what’s available and use that to build a strategy. No point in going after Tunnel Dice if there aren’t enough 1s or Magic Dice on the board, right? Take a look at the board and see what you think you can get before you start grabbing.
• You can take big swings with certain dice. Going hard on Treasures or Pickaxes + Cave-Ins or Shields + Dragons can lead to a ton of points. Try to do that subtly so that other players don’t notice it all adding up, or use Magic Dice to reroll.
• The thing to watch out for is players with Shields or Pickaxes; they can make a lot of points out of nothing, and you don’t really want to take the dice they’re scoring. If you see a player with two+ Shields, you should be worried; that means every dragon they take is worth 2 points (positive), and those can really add up! The problem is that drafting Dragons yourself isn’t particularly helpful, since they’re just straight negative points for you. You either have to get a shield or just let it happen. That said, it’s not all sunshine and roses; if they don’t have enough Treasure Chests, they’ll have to reroll and might take big penalties next round.
• Magic dice are great, but don’t overdo it; otherwise, you’ll have nothing to reroll. There’s an understandable desire to grab the dice that let you mitigate risks and bad things happening to you, but if you overdo it then you’ll end up with no dice to actually roll. Then it’s all risk mitigation and nothing to … mitigate.
• Lean into your character’s abilities. Your characters all have some starting utility! Try to make that work for you and don’t forget about it come scoring time! You can use their innate abilities to start your combos a bit better.
• If you start getting useful combinations, keep in mind that you can get Treasure Chests to hold some of those dice over. That’s kind of key if you want to either protect yourself (by saving a Pickaxe or a Shield), make way on Treasure majorities (by saving high-value Treasure), or just pummel your opponents with volume (by keeping a few Shields and high-value Dragons). Saving your dice so that you don’t have to reroll them can be huge, especially since you never know what you’ll get next round.
• It’s almost always worth giving Beer to someone, especially since each round you learn every player’s score. Beer has two benefits. The first benefit is that you get to take more dice, which is good on its face and can help you sneakily take something one of your opponents wanted. The second is a bit harder to quantify, but it generally is a good idea to have other players who like you and want to help you. You might just end up getting a better die back than the one you gave out. Plus, each round you do learn who’s in last place, so you might as well help them unless it’s a close game, right?

Pros, Mehs, and Cons

Pros

• You know, the mountain really does make the game. It worked for Everdell and it works here. Having a big thing that the game revolves around is just such a compelling experience. There’s really nothing else for it. The plastic mountain in the deluxe version is even better, though it doesn’t fit in the box, which is mildly annoying. I have no idea where to put it.
• I think rerolling your unsaved dice each round makes the game really interesting. It accomplishes that thing that sometimes annoys me when you play the same game for multiple rounds. Here, the dice you took previously matter. They affect what’s left in the draft pool and they can influence what’s in your current hoard for subsequent rounds of play. Means you need to be careful, but also makes the strategy interesting.
• A simple drafting game with some interesting rules about what you can take is a great warm-up game for experienced gamers or a solid game night for newer folks. Drafting is generally pretty great as a mechanic because it’s pretty quick to explain; your goal is just to take what you want. So… grab it. It makes it pretty easy to pick up, but there’s still plenty of strategic depth to keep experienced gamers engaged. It just works nicely for everyone.
• Plays pretty quickly. It’s a relatively short game; three rounds and you’re done.
• I mean, I’m always here for custom dice. They’re always really nice! They just elevate a game a bit. I appreciate that the pips on the Tunnel Dice are gem-shaped, as well! It’s that kind of subtlety that makes a game.
• Comes with its own solo gameplay rules for those of y’all who are into that sort of thing. Not much more to say about that! There’s a solo mode.

Mehs

• This is mostly an issue with the deluxe mountain (boo-hoo, I know), but there’s technically almost enough room to put more than 20 dice on there if you’re not paying attention. We messed that up in our first game. It didn’t take us long to realize that there were too many dice, but they still kind of fit so we thought that’s how it was supposed to look. Similarly annoying is that the deluxe mountain doesn’t fit in the base game box, but alas.

Cons

• You can definitely get some runaway scoring if players happen into a pretty big combo. I guess other players should have stopped them or something? The game is pretty short, so it’s not the worst thing. It’s usually frustrating when a player has a big enough play that it’s hard to catch them, but for players who already start with a Pickaxe or a Shield, that swing can be enormous. All they need is another (or even more, worst-case) and they’re starting to net huge point totals if they can get black Hazard Dice. I think my issue here is that there’s no benefit to trying to move against them unless you have your own Pickaxe or Shield because otherwise it just earns you negative points. Thankfully, as is the case with some of these, the short length of the game mitigates this to some degree.

Overall: 8 / 10

Overall, I like Dice Miner! It does a nice job of adding a 3D element to the drafting mechanic, as you have to take dice from the top of the mine to the bottom. That’s a nice bit of theme and gameplay integration that I appreciate, even if the whole dwarves-fighting-dragons thing was a little lost on me elsewhere. I also enjoy that the scoring mechanics are pretty simple: there’s straights (1-2-3-4-5), majorities (Treasure Dice), and Usually Bad Dice (the Hazard Dice unless you can get the right counters). Then there are a few types of modifying dice and that’s the whole thing, Makes the game remarkably easy to explain, take to game night, and play with just about anyone. The one major challenge for me is that the nice plastic mountain doesn’t fit in my game box, so I may have to make do with the cardboard one if I want to make the game as portable as possible. I’m a bit concerned about players who can string together massive combos, but, they come with their own drawbacks, so try to lean into those if you can to make the game harder for them. But Dice Miner gets one thing extremely right: if you’re going to have dice, custom dice make the little math rocks much more appealing, and they have custom dice in spades with this one. If you’re into custom dice, drafting games, or you just want a big centerpiece to your game that everyone looks at the whole time, Dice Miner’s got it, and you’ll likely enjoy it!

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