Base price: $25.
3 – 6 players.
Play time: ~30 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 2
Full disclosure: A review copy of Mythical Dice was provided by Hachette Boardgames / IELLO.
I have PAX East this coming week, so I’m trying to get a bit ahead on reviews, I suppose it’s next week, from the perspective of me writing, but from you reading, you know, it’s a whole temporal thing. It’s going to be a busy couple of weeks, but I should have plenty to talk about. This is the last week of Greek Month-ology, so this time we’re reviewing a game with a minotaur on the cover. That counts! It largely counts because I’m explicitly making the rules, but that’s the business. Let’s see how things go with Mythical Dice, then.
In Mythical Dice, you take on the role of any of a host of mythical creatures, gambling to see how many tricks they can win. Betting big can be useful, but, the thing is, rather than your standard trick-taking game where you can play cards from your hand, you’ve only got dice of a variety of colors. That makes things, pardon the pun, tricky. Even if you have “better” dice, you can only trust a roll so much. Dice are finicky like that. Each round, you’ll draw a number of random dice equal to the round number, then bet on how many tricks you can win. Then you play! Standard dice, when led, must be followed with dice of the same color (or special dice). Sound familiar? Yes, it’s similar to Skull King, but with dice! Scoring is similar too, and it’s just as mean! We love a mean trick-taking game. Can you trick your way to the win?
Contents
Player Count Differences
This one shifts a bit with player count. As the player count increases, you play fewer overall rounds, and your ability to judge how many tricks you’re going to take per round is definitely going to shift. With three, you can reasonably assert how your dice compare to other players. With six? Literally anyone’s guess. That’s kind of the trouble with dice; you can’t really make a case for how they are going to roll in the future. With more players, you can at least make the assumption that fewer and fewer of the dice remain in the bag. Things get a bit more confusing from that point and I haven’t really taken a probability class in a long time. Otherwise, though, you’re adding in more chaos as you add more players. If that’s your bag, great, if not, you’re likely going to find lower player counts being more your speed.
Strategy
- Know your probabilities. Each face has a one-in-six chance of rolling their face. Sum up the faces, divide by six: that’s the expected value of that die. Red dice have a higher expected value than yellow have a higher expected value than purple, which is obviously higher than gray. Gray sucks. That said, sometimes gray rolls the highest value of all, which … might mess with your counts a bit. Knowing the relative value of your dice is still important though; it’ll help you dice how to bid.
- You can’t expect too consistent performance from your dice; they’re dice. You can still roll absolutely terrible or way too well. That’s dice.
- Being the last person to play can also help you gauge what to do next. If you want to win the trick, you can always dunk a special die and hopefully that works out. If you can’t or don’t want to, you have to match the color of the die that’s already been started. If you don’t have that one, you can play whatever. Go for a higher expected value if you want a shot at winning, shoot lower if you want to lose.
- Throwing a gray die seems like the right way to lose a trick, but it doesn’t always work. Be absolutely sure you’re aware of the risks here. Sure, it’s almost always a one or a white flag (instant loss), but sometimes it’s a seven and then you suddenly win that trick? Usually a disaster.
- The special dice have a rock-paper-scissors effect on each other, provided you don’t roll a white flag. Brown beats green beats blue beats brown, I believe. If you roll a white flag on any of those, you just lose. If you have all three, blue wins! That’s confusing but it all makes sense I suppose.
- Watch out for how brutal scoring can be. If you miss your bid, you lose 20 points for each trick you’re off by. If you bid 0, you lose 10 points for each trick in the round. You don’t get any bonus points either, if you would have earned them. That can be … tough.
- If you can’t make things work for you, might as well ruin them for everyone else! Already missed your bid? Might as well just start taking tricks or losing them to screw everyone else out of their bid as well. It’s fantastic. The thrill of dragging someone else down to the depths with you is pretty much the ideal of the whole game.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- The dice screens are a nice way to prevent anyone seeing your dice. It’s a pretty low-tech solution and they don’t wobble or fall over or anything, which is great.
- The dice actually make the cognitive load of learning the game a bit easier, I think? I think trick-taking games can be a lot to pick up and learn, and with dice, there’s just less overhead. You don’t have as much variance between what’s available, and that makes it easier to learn.
- Plays pretty quickly. You just kind of pick a die and roll it. Easy enough. There’s not a ton of decision-making either, since the decision can occasionally be out of your hands.
- There are big highs and low lows because of how random the dice can be, which is often pretty fun. I think it makes things thrilling. Sometimes it absolutely screws you over, though, which is also funny.
- I personally like the Skull King scoring system? It’s great. It’s unbearably mean and I think that’s perfect. I think that having to deal with a ton of negative points might lead to just ending the game with a negative score, which isn’t great for everyone, but you know how it is.
- You can mess with other players pretty effectively. You can effectively meddle by shifting who wins tricks either towards or away from yourself to try to make your bid while also dunking on other players’ plans. It’s a good plan.
Mehs
- The actual coherence of the game is kind of … low? The monsters and such are just a scattershot group with no thematic overlap. There’s a griffin, a mummy, a … skeleton, a … jack-o-lantern guy? I don’t really get the whole scheme that’s happening here. How did the Minotaur get involved? Is this even mythology or just a bunch of randos? I don’t love it.
- It can be challenging to make good predictions given how fickle the dice can be. You can rely on at least one of the dice messing you up, but expectation is also your friend. On a standard D6, your expected value on any roll in particular is 3.5. These are obviously not standard D6s, so it’s worth thinking about how the weighted values on the dice affect what you can expect to roll or get.
- I do miss the ten-round nightmare that is Skull King. I just like having a ton of cards and having to make bad decisions. Cutting it short cuts me, in a way, and with more players having even fewer rounds? It bums me out.
Cons
- The dice bag is weirdly small. I can’t even fit my whole hand in there and, you know, I need to be able to grab dice out of it! I wish the opening were maybe … twice as large? Or maybe someone in the process just has very small hands? I have no idea what happened.
Overall: 7.75 / 10
Overall, Mythical Dice is fun! It really lands well as a slightly more whimsical, luckier Skull King. I’ve always been a huge fan of Skull King’s absolutely brutal scoring system, and mixing it (only negative points if you don’t meet your bid) with dice leads to high comedy. Even if you have great dice, you can have bad rolls, or worryingly, vice versa. Sometimes you have terrible dice and you roll incredibly, taking tricks that you have no business or desire taking. You still experience that sometimes in other trick-taking games, but I like that here you aren’t necessarily sure what value you’re going to play until the die hits the table. It’s refreshing, fun, and heinously stressful. Plus, you get more dice as the game goes on. I do wish the game went for more rounds, but I understand that more rounds require more dice and more dice raises the price of the game. Keeping games affordable is important, though it does feel like they skimped on the dice bag. All the dice fit in the bag, yes, but my hand doesn’t, which makes it hard to pull the dice out of the bag. Not a problem for the first round, but certainly an issue by round 8. If the dice were all the same it wouldn’t matter, but if you grab too many dice you have to put some back and you obviously have to choose randomly or it’s not fair. All fixable issues if the bag were a bit easier to maneuver inside. But beyond that, I think the dice make the game easier to pick up because players are just color-matching or choosing a special die, and then it’s very easy to resolve a particular trick. And that’s good! If you’re looking for a lower-lift variant on Skull King, you enjoy the occasional mummy with your minotaur, or you just want dice in all aspects of your life, I’d recommend checking Mythical Dice out!
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