Game Review: Dice Manor

Who doesn’t love as good game with dice? Here at Gaming with Sidekicks dice represent our history and they also are featured in a lot of our favorite games. We would love to share a new board game with “dice” right in the title and up front in gameplay. Let’s take a look together and see what we have!

Dice Manor is designed by Garrett Herdter with illustration by Roomie Gontaruk and Damien Mammoliti. The game is published by Arcane Wonders. It plays 2-4 players in 30-45 mins.

Overview:

In Dice Manor players compete to be the best designed dream home by using blueprints, ad space and giving tours of their creations. The player with the most praise from the community will be the winner!

Gameplay:

Each player begins with an entrance tile, advertisement marker, 9 dice of their color and 2 inpsiration tokens. Each player can also take a player aide card. The prestige board, project board and tokens are all placed near the supply. Seperate the room tiles by type and flip a top tile from each stack.

The game is played in 4 rounds, at the beginning of each round players enter into 4 phases of the round. The phases are:

1. Bid

2. Collect

3. Build

4. Reset

In Bid players take turns rolling all of their dice and choosing to place all of the dice of one number on their board and Manor. If you are out of dice, you skip this turn. Inspiration tokens can be used to change up the numbers or re-roll dice.

You can place the dice you choose on a number of different locations. You can place them on a blueprint space to bid on that tile, advertising to gain prestige or give an early tour of your Manor to gain prestige as well.

In Collect, players resolve the places where their dice were placed one area at a time. This involves blueprints if you have the highest bid and gaining prestige based on how you place on the advertising track. You could collect your bonus dice as they move closer to you on the track each time you move up. Manor tours gain you 1 prestige per die you collect and move back in your pile at the end of of this phase.

In Build, players will decide how to add any new room that they acquired. Doors will be a big part of the choices you make, doors and walls don’t mix! You can rotate those new rooms however you want and add them accordingly.

Finally in Reset players will advance the round marker, pass first player and refresh the blueprints. Then the next round will begin for all players with the new first player starting us off again.

The game will continue until the Grand Opening tour at the end of the game where players will place dice as normal except they all play at the same time and can only use dice to tour their Manors. After that tour each player scores end-game prestige based on the color majority, manor diversity, leftover inspiration and and largest manors. Once all that is scored the player with the most prestige is the winner!

Impressions:

Players will find this game appealing in a number of ways. First off, I really enjoyed the tiles and dice rolling/placement mechanic. I’m a big dice game fan and placement is one of my favorite ways to play with dice. When you get a game like this that is giving you multiple options for your dice rolls so that any one number isn’t the best but all sides give you potential it is a good dice placement game.

Another aspect I loved is the overall presentation and design. For a game that isn’t a deluxe edition or special crowdfunding version this retail game is well made and looks great on the table. I love the dice and the colors of the game really pop off the table.

Players who are new to dice placement mechanics may find the mechanic itself difficult to fully grasp especially if you’re used to dice chucking and rolling them as their only function. But one thing I have found is that this is an easy teach once they understand how the mechanic works. Games with complicated directions can be daunting for people to understand and this one does not make it a challenge, in fact it is laid out so well that newer players could tackle the rulebook by themselves.

This game also fills a nice niche for me in that it is a great game to play after dinner with the family as it plays light and quick enough to not overstay its welcome but is a game with enough going on that I feel like I got a good challenge in for everyone.

Overall Dice Manor is a challenge you will enjoy, rolling dice and placing dice and tiles to see who can show off the most prestige in their grand manor. Next time you are looking for a new game for the collection consider brining Dice Manor home!