Base price: $33.
2 – 7 players.
Play time: 25 – 30 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 10? 

Full disclosure: A review copy of 7 Wonders Dice was provided by Asmodee.

Okay, this time around I’m staying eyes on the prize. I have a big cake on my dining room table and I would like some, but I have to finish writing this review first. It’s like a marshmallow test, except less fake. That comes up a lot in these reviews, oddly. We can unpack that another time. Unfortunately, I think I’ve overcompensated on “cold room makes me write better” because my hands are a little bit too cold to write effectively. Hoping that changes as they warm up. In the meantime, let’s check out 7 Wonders Dice!

In 7 Wonders Dice, the classic drafting game has claimed another genre yet again, moving to become a roll-and-write game. Each turn, one player will roll for the group who can then claim a die (based on its cost) and perform the corresponding action. Different buildings have different abilities, from giving you points to money (to pay for other actions) to resources to even, occasionally, other dice. You’ll need all of those things to keep building, as each space has a resource cost and the difference comes out of your wallet. With enough resources, you can even build one of the legendary Wonders, making your civilization’s mark on the past and future. Or you can just buy a bunch of axes and declare war on your friends. You can do both, honestly. So that’s nice. Rounding out the bunch are the guilds, the leaders, and the spies. These challenging dice can only be unlocked with science and time, so you’d better get started. Do you have what it takes to roll a legendary civilization?

Contents

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

Player Count Differences

Yeah, almost none in particular in this one. There are a few things that other players can affect, and that’s your ability to use the Guild (purple) Die, the presence of the gray Resource Dice (as their actions can remove them) and how many points you / they score from using Barracks (red) Dice. With the red dice, you only ever deal with the player to your left and the player to your right (or, in a two-player game, your opponent). The higher your defense, the fewer points they score when they attack from that side. With the purple die, there are more players potentially focusing on things, which may make it hard for you to have the most of one building checked off and score those points. And with the gray dice, as players unlock the white / black / purple dice, they’ll remove those from play. This means that if you’re not careful, with more players, they might each unlock one of those quickly enough that you lose the ability to easily gain more resources. Beyond that, though, it doesn’t matter a ton? You don’t really notice the difference between 3 / 4 players, as there’s just one player you don’t really affect or engage with. Even with the red dice, it’s not like you are explicitly doing anything to someone else; you just cause them to get slightly fewer points as you increase your defense.

Strategy

• I’m very pro-science, but it depends on your game, I suppose. I just like getting to unlock the special dice sooner rather than later. The black Spy die lets you basically do whatever action you want, provided it comes up, and I think that’s neat. Some civilizations make science actions easier, either by discounting them, rewarding you for taking them, or incorporating them into your Wonder. Keep in mind what your board rewards before you fully commit to an idea.
• If you have enough money, you don’t necessarily need resources. If you can keep paying the resource cost and the die cost, you can skip out on collecting resources. I think it’s a little inadvisable, but I’m also not the boss of you.
• Sometimes the dice outcomes will affect what you can do. Stay flexible. Conversely, if you want to take a die with a cost of 3 and you only have 2 money, well, you can’t do that. You can pass and take 3 money, but that almost always feels bad to me. Maybe there are other actions you can take?
• I generally don’t take the 7-money die unless it’s very early in the game. It feels like a waste later in the game unless you’re completely broke. Usually, I try to gain the 7 money bonus early to pad out the required spending later in the game, especially if I don’t collect all the resources.
• The gold building is definitely context-dependent. You get immediate money (for the right side) based on how many spaces of that type you’ve checked off. You also get points at the end of the game. Endgame points are good, but if you cross those spaces off too early, you’re not really getting any money for them.
• The three unlockable dice (purple / white / black) are all good. They can give you a ton of points or a wide variety of options. It’s almost always worth going after them, especially if one of your opponents has already unlocked them. Can’t let them keep that to themselves.
• Consider timing when completing buildings; do you actually want one of the relevant bonuses right now? One of the bonuses, for instance, is take another turn with the current dice. If the dice all suck, maybe you … don’t want to do that. Maybe you’d rather wait and complete your last space of your Wonder later when you have something you actually want to do with those dice?

Pros, Mehs, and Cons

Pros

• Actually a pretty pleasant and cogent 7 Wonders experience without as much complexity. If you’re asking for a rough estimate, it’s more complicated than 7 Wonders Architects (not by a ton) and still significantly less complicated than 7 Wonders or 7 Wonders Duel. A pretty digestible casual game, in my opinion. It still has a lot of the fun of what makes 7 Wonders interesting, though! Just without all the drafting and explicit tech trees. They’re more implicit, here.
• I like the art style! It’s fun. I think I prefer it a bit more cartoony; the classic 7 Wonders I have is a bit too serious, save for the Mannekin Pis wonder, which is inherently extremely silly. I may have bought too many of the promos. It used to be my favorite game.
• I think the gameplay here is very smooth and easy to learn, which is great. You really just pick one die and kind of roll with it. There’s not a ton of complex chaining. The most challenging thing is understanding that the die costs something (between 0 and 3) to use, and then the space has a resource cost (between 0 and 6) to check off. Usually you have more than one resource, which discounts that second price, not the first one. That’s most of it.
• The resource management puzzle isn’t too complex here, either. Getting resources doesn’t mean you spend them; you just have access to that resource type forever. It’s much easier and requires a lot less thought than some other games (though it is, now that I think about it, consistent with classic 7 Wonders).
• I’d be very interested in seeing what an expansion looks like. New Wonders or new actions would be nice, though I don’t know if that would sync up terribly well with the old boards.
• Portability is nice. It’s a smaller box, which is nice, though I wish all the 7 Wonders family of boxes were the same size for storage reasons. I think it’s similar to the 7 Wonders Duel box.
• Super easy to set up and play. You just give each player a Wonder and you’re ready to go, basically. Love to see it.

Mehs

• I do wish the boards actually said which Wonder they were on them. I’m kind of baffled as to why they don’t? I guess it doesn’t matter, but it’s a missed opportunity for at least some bit of grounding within the game itself.

Cons

• Whew, the grease pencils weren’t a great choice. On one level, I just conceptually hate them. But more pressingly, they leave nasty little grooves in the boards as you play, which I have issues with from a longevity standpoint. Players also break them and then you have to sharpen them, which sucks. To be fair, they don’t run out of ink like dry-erase markers that players insist on leaving uncapped for an entire game, but I’m not sure this was the right fix either.
• The dice shaker also … doesn’t work particularly well. Maybe there’s a technique to this or maybe I just got too used to Board Game Arena, but the top of the box is too close to the bottom so you can’t shake it up and down to scatter the dice. As a result, you end up shaking it right and left, which often leads to rounds where dice tend to favor one side of the board. If that’s the 0 / 1 side, great for everyone; if it’s the 2 / 3 side, the game’s going to get expensive. I think I wish they had made some kind of cardboard dice tower (or just used the full game box).

Overall: 8.75 / 10

I mean, I do keep coming back and playing more 7 Wonder Dice. It’s rapidly become one of my favorite, go-to, “let’s make some quick decisions and see what happens” games. Part of it is my old fondness for classic 7 Wonders, combined with a love for quick and punchy roll-and-write games, for sure. The other part of it is that I think it’s just impeccably well-designed. Some product choices I disagree with, for sure, but the actual core gameplay loop is simple, makes sense, and competitively interesting. I may not win every game I play (Antoine frequently has our number, sad to say), but I thoroughly enjoy every game I play. I try new things, see where the dice take me, and I end up where I end up. I suppose that more agency could be nice to some degree, but honestly, I like the inherent passivity of 7 Wonders Dice. I still get to make choices about how and when I spend my money to shore up my resource availability, and that’s plenty. Given how similar the boards are, I do wonder if there are expansions in the cards for this. Maybe they’ll add a mini-board and a new die? Maybe they’ll just make entirely new Wonders, like the promos and expansions did. I do miss the Catan wonder. I’ll head back to Catan eventually for that Soccer Fever review I’ve been sitting on anyways. But I think they’ve done a great job making another approachable spin on 7 Wonders for a nice, casual game. Architects was good, too. I think that a lot of players who are getting into the hobby aren’t necessarily clamoring for four-hour experiences; some want a simple game you can play while you’re having a snack with friends or catching up, and 7 Wonders Dice is certainly that. If you’re looking for that, you’re a big 7 Wonders fan, or you just try to play every roll-and-write you’ve heard of, 7 Wonders Dice will likely be right up your alley! I’ve really had fun with it.

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