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Review on ๐ŸŽฒ WizKids Warhammer 000 Dice Masters: Conquer Battles with Precision! by James Julien

Revainrating 4 out of 5

Excellent gameplay is hampered by dizzying component choices

2 Players, Competitive Mode, Build/Draw BonesGameplay Overview and Combat. There are several different themes in this series, but in this review we will be discussing the Warhammer 40k version. The idea is simple: take the dice from the bag and use them to either buy more dice for the bag or deal damage to the opponent. The first player to reduce another player's life to zero wins! To go into all of this in a little more detail, players need to choose their team from the start. The campaign box I'm going to review contains enough cards for two players to each choose up to 8 different team members, one side for the Chaos Lord Nurgle and the other side for the Ultramarines. There are three different maps for each of the eight team members, giving you some variety in customizing your team. Once they have been chosen and the cards and matching dice have been placed in front of their respective players, place a pair of base set cards in the center of the game board. You also have some dice that are neutral and can receive either side. Now each card has an ability that you can use after you buy and draw bones for your bag. Some dice/card abilities work in combination with others, so keep an eye out for those synergistic combinations. From now on, each player has 8 uniform basic cubes in his pocket. Players take turns drawing four dice from their pocket and manipulating them. They get one free rep for each of the four tosses and then have to decide what to do with them. Depending on what they roll, they can use it as energy and buy more dice from the revealed order cards, or they can use it to attack, defend against an attack, or do nothing and just let the extra energy go to waste. The fact is that the used cubes do not immediately go back into the bag. You step aside, and only when your pocket is empty all the dice are added back, basically like a deck building card game. And that's almost all. Players will take turns doing this over and over again until one player's health drops to zero (down from 20) and the surviving player is the winner! was very confused by what i saw. I can't understand what the game developers were thinking when they made this game. There aren't really many components to discuss here, just dice and cards, so it's even more confusing. First let me say the bones are AWESOME. Each set is unique with interesting symbols to distinguish them from other and completely different colors. And there are LOTS of them too, which is great, giving you plenty to choose from as you build your team. They also have a very strong, excellent feel when rolled. Luckily, the main thing you're going to play with is excellent. The quality of the cards isn't as good as the dice, but to be honest they're not THAT bad. I mean you will not mix them or even hold them in your hands. They are intended for reference when purchasing or using the appropriate dice. The artwork on them is also very nice, so no complaints about them either. Unfortunately I have to turn into the negative zone here. The game comes with two tiny player mats printed on nothing but toilet paper. Now these rugs would be very helpful as they show the exact process of manipulating your dice and keeping them in order, but they are so small once you add dice to your bag that they become useless. Not only that, a slight exhale from your mouth will blow things off your desk, they are so fragile. The dice bags from which you draw all your dice are also made of super-thin paper material. I remember pulling them out of the box at first without understanding what they were for. They were folded like the secret note passed around in elementary school. I opened them up and admitted they all have beautiful glittery designs to tell them apart but that's about the only good thing I can say about them. You are so thin and weak! Not only that, it seems so uninteresting trying to pull bones out of a little paper bag. Those good premium dice deserve more than that. Another thing that really bothered me was the lack of a way to track your health. This game just asks for some kind of playmat with all these built-in features. In any case, expect a piece of paper or something to keep track of each player's health. Oh, and do yourself a favor and log on to their website to open up a picture of the tiny gamemats, expand them to full page size, and print out a few. I bet your printer paper will be thicker and the image will be large enough to mount. One more thing! For some reason I don't know, they decided to include three dice for every card that can be bought during the game. However, each card specifically states that the maximum number of dice you can buy is fourโ€ฆโ€ฆ.Well, it's not a big deal to me during normal play, but man I could see that some strategies were seriously coming through the lack of dice will affect this extra dice. for each card. I mean, just glancing at the various card powers, I saw that one of the Chaos cards has an ability that says something like "For each die rolled, attack increases by 1". So obviously you want to MAXIMIZE the amount of this cube in particular. To do this you now need to purchase TWO of these sets ONLY for the extra cube you need for each. ?!?!?!?! Overall, the best word I can think of to describe the entire set is "bug". The game is still playable, which I guess they were trying to do here, but what they've done to some of the components here is so ridiculous it seriously baffles me. Box / Storage I had no problems with the box. and a storage solution, to be honest, and I really like it a lot. The set includes a solid insert that securely holds all dice and cards with a topper. Also, the box is actually very thin, so you can easily slide it onto a shelf. If there's something at play, at least what they got right is the storage solution. Visual Attraction / Theme The theme originally drew me to the game as I really love the Warhammer universe and even more so Nurgle of the Chaos Gods. They did a great job with the illustrations on all the cards and all the bones look great. I mentioned that before, but this game is from a long line of Dice Masters games, each with a unique theme. Even if you are not interested in this topic but the gameplay sounds like you might like it, in this line you will find another theme that you will like. However, if you like Warhammer 40k then I highly recommend this book. Rule Book I wouldn't even call what comes with this game a rule book. It reminds me more of a gas station brochure that you flip through to look at local attractions. There's no component list explaining what you're getting and what it all means. Instead, there's a full-size printer paper page that contains a list of cards with card names...but that won't make sense to someone new to the game. The setup page is literally the worst game setup section I've ever seen out of the 200+ rulebooks I've read at the time of writing this article. There's this tiny picture, and above it it just says 'build game as pictured'. I had to go online to find the rulebook and use my computer to zoom in on the image to see the names of the cards to use. One of these doesn't appear to be included in the set, I've looked everywhere and couldn't even find it on the card listing page that's included in the set. In hindsight, I could have used ALL the cards to prepare, but as a new player you literally DO NOT UNDERSTAND what the cards even mean or do at this point. And that's all for setup, there's no explanation or anything. Well I don't know, maybe the people writing this booklet are just bored and expect people to already know how to play since there are many games with dice masters. But as you enter EVERY game, expect to explain it to players as if they were BRAND NEW to the game. This tiny excerpt from the preparation is unacceptable. After that, the rules immediately jump into a quick twist that turned out to be not as bad as I expected after that horrible prep experience. However, since the setup was so odd, I had already flipped through the pamphlet trying to figure out what the cards actually did or what they were used for, and noticed that the rest of the pamphlet was just long explanations of each move with a hodgepodge of random images. leaving. I mean it's bad. The ONLY good thing I can say about this brochure is that it has a summary of the move at the very end. They're very useful, and since the entire booklet is about the size of a standard playing card in diameter, slightly larger, it's easy to have close by for reference. Overall bad, bad, bad. redeem yourself here Interaction with the player doesn't stop as you fight back and forth, creating an army of dice and figuring out ways to use your dice against the enemy for maximum effect. I also love the thrill of pulling the bones out of the bag and the instant decisions on how you're going to manipulate them. Add to that the interesting card mechanics of the team you use in this game and you have a truly addictive dice game that I personally prefer to Dice Throne. I would say that is ideal. Of course, you can also set it up alone to test the different abilities of the cards and improve your skills by playing on both sides. The replay value is actually quite high as each side has so many different cards with abilities to choose from for their team. Also, since you are only allowed to have a maximum of 20 dice in your pocket, there may be dice that you don't even use in the game. This keeps the game fresh for a long time and of course the randomness of the dice roll to keep players on their toes. Positive Final Thoughts In terms of gameplay, this is one of my favorite craps games, if not my favourite. The rolling of the dice is great and this matches the interesting abilities of the cards AND the fact that there are so many different combinations making this game very interesting and fun. Combat is simple but strategic, and the dice are of very high quality, perfectly matching the colors of each side. Generally super high marks for these items, thanks to the designers. Negative closing thoughts, BUT everything else, from the rules booklet to paper bags of dice, tiny unusable player mats, and the odd lack of a full dice set for each card just left me scratching. my head. Who made these decisions? End up buying the game just for the gameplay as this random selection of components will definitely turn you off. If you can find the game on sale for $20 or less I will definitely buy it as I already plan to spend more to tweak/update the game to save it from these horrible component choices.

Pros
  • Great Prize
Cons
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