What is Dice Throne?
Dice Throne is a Player vs Player dice roller game, where each player picks a character and takes their unique dice and deck of cards. They then take turns rolling dice to activate abilities, with the aim of reducing their opponent to zero health, before their opponent does the same to them.
How Do You Play Dice Throne?
Once a player has selected their character, and set up their hero board, which lists all the offensive, defensive and passive abilities they have access to, they roll off to see who goes first and the turns begin. During their turn, players get a chance to activate an offensive ability by rolling their dice. The Dice Throne dice are unique to each character and have a number and symbol on each face. Characters can activate abilities by getting set numbers of symbols, or runs of numbers known as straights. To get these combinations, players roll all five of their dice, up to three times, looking for the best combination.
Each character also has a unique deck of cards, which can be used to upgrade their abilities, boost their attacks and defense, draw additional cards, or interrupt your opponent's turn and force them to reroll dice or modify your own.
Damage comes in several forms, some is straight damage, which can be defended against with each character's defense ability. To activate a defense ability, players roll the number of dice listed on their hero board, looking for the symbols or straight that activate their defense ability. Some damage is undefendable, which means that it can only be avoided or reduced with cards and abilities.
Games of Dice Throne are generally, 1v1, but there are also options for 3 player King of the Hill, 2v2, and 3v3 team games.
Dice Throne Adventures
Dice Throne Adventures is an expansion for Dice Throne that adds a solo and co-operative dungeon crawl mode. Players pick their favorite Dice Throne character and explore dungeon tiles, battling enemies and bosses. A full Dice Throne Adventure campaign takes place across four dungeons, known as Portal Crawls, with 4 unique boss battles in between. Characters find loot, which can be added to their decks for future battles, as they work towards the final showdown with the Mad King.
Dice Throne Adventures is a huge expansion and includes a large range of portal scenarios for each of the four levels, along with fifty-two minions that can be found during Portal Crawls. Minions are limited in their abilities, and players roll for their attacks, looking for the roll objective listed on their card.
The four bosses come with their own deck of cards which are used to upgrade the bosses' abilities during set up, and also have effects during their turn. They activate like minions, but have their own boss board, listing a range of attacks and abilities.
Player's turns operate in the same way that they do in normal Dice Throne games, with them rolling dice and activating abilities, playing cards, and defending against enemy attacks. When fighting against minions, you complete the whole battle by yourself, but against bosses, your team shares a health pool, and players alternate turns, with the bosses attacking them each in between.
To represent the heroes moving around the map, Dice Throne Adventures comes with card stand-ups for all of the current Dice Throne heroes, and these can be upgraded with Season One and two miniature packs.
Dice Throne Adventures also includes the rules for boss vs boss battles, if players want to try their hand at controlling a boss, and also the rules for games of a boss vs many, where one player plays the boss against up to four Dice Throne heroes.
Dice Throne Adventures, like all Dice Throne products, includes one of the best storage solutions on the market. All of the components fit into four Gametrayz that help keep the game set up fast, as all the different cards are store and divided between games for easy access. Each tray also has a robust clip-on lid, which means that even during transport, the pieces don't move around too much.
Dice Throne Season 1
Season One of Dice Throne includes 8 characters, which can be bought in set packs of two, or all eight in a single Battle Chest. We look at the different Dice Throne products available in the Products section below. If you're looking to pick up Dice Throne now, look for the Dice Throne Season One Rerolled packs, which have upgraded artwork and layouts to match the Season Two packs, along with adding in two new characters to Season One Rerolled, that weren't originally included.
The Dice Throne Season One characters are:
- Barbarian - The Barbarian likes to deal damage and occasionally heal themselves. They have abilities that let them inflict Concussion, making their opponent skip their next card draw and combat point phase, or Stun, which allows the Barbarian to make another offensive roll against their opponent.
- Moon Elf - The Moon Elf likes to give themselves Evasive tokens to try and avoid incoming damage, while inflicting negative effects on your opponent to reduce their options, combing this with dealing steady damage to them.
- Monk - The Monk has a focus on using Chi, which can be used to increase or reduce damage, which they are well equipped to deal in decent numbers. They also have access to the Knockdown effect, which causes their opponent to burn 2 combat points, or skip their next offensive dice roll.
- Paladin - The Paladin has a mixture of offensive and defensive effects and healing abilities and is able to deal 1/2 damage back to an opponent with their Retribution effect.
- Pyromancer - The Pyromancer has an aggressive playstyle, putting Burn tokens which last from round to round on their opponent while building their own Fire Mastery tokens for large damage effects.
- Shadow Thief - The Shadow Thief is able to dodge entire attacks with the Shadows effect while slowly building up Poison on their opponents to deal damage each upkeep.
- Treant - The Treant is able to summon Seedlings, and use Spirits to upgrade them to Saplings, then Dryad's with increasing effects. They can also inflict a Barbed Vine on their opponent, which damages them for each roll attempt during their turn.
- Ninja - The Ninja likes to poison their opponents, dealing a steady stream of damage at the end of their turns, along with Smoke Bombs, for the possibility of restricting incoming damage. They also have access to the Ninjutsu status, which can be used to boost their own attack rolls.
Dice Throne Season 2
Season Two of Dice Throne includes 8 characters, which can be bought in set packs of two, or all eight in a single Battle Chest. We look at the different Dice Throne products available in the Products section below.
The Dice Throne Season Two characters are:
- Gunslinger
- Samurai
- Tactician
- Huntress
- Artificer
- Cursed Pirate
- Seraph
- Vampire Lord
We'll update this section when we've had a chance to play with the Season 2 characters more.
Dice Throne Products
Dice Throne Season Battle Boxes
There are several characters available for Dice Throne, which are all listed above so you can get an idea of their playstyle. They are packaged in groups of two, and each Season Box comes as a complete 1v1 game with everything two players need to play.
There are two types of Dice Throne Season 1 Boxes available. Season One Rerolled packs have upgraded artwork and layouts to match the Season Two packs, along with adding in two new characters to Season One Rerolled, that weren't originally included.
The available boxes are:
Season 1 Rerolled
- Battle 1 - Barbarian vs Moon Elf
- Battle 2 - Monk vs Paladin
- Battle 3 - Pyromancer vs Shadow Thief
- Battle 4 - Treant vs Ninja
Season 2
- Battle 1 - Gunslinger vs Samurai
- Battle 2 - Tactician vs Huntress
- Battle 3 - Artificer vs Cursed Pirate
- Battle 4 - Seraph vs vampire lord
Dice Throne Battle Chest
Each Season of Dice Throne comes with a Battle Chest, which includes all eight characters from that Season, contained in a single box. Each of the heroes in the Battle Chest also contains the Champion Edition swirl dice, rather than the matt colored dice from the standard Battle Boxes.
Dice Throne Adventures
Dice Throne Adventures is the cooperative and single-player expansion for Dice Throne. It adds in a dungeon crawl campaign, along with 1 vs many boss battles and also boss v boss games with players taking control of one of the bosses.
We talk in detail about Dice Throne Adventure in the section above.
Accessories
There are several accessories available for Dice Throne, which while aren't essential for games, help protect your components. There are full playmats, dice trays, and card sleeves available, and also painted and unpainted miniatures to replace the card stand-ups in Dice Throne Adventures.
There are also sets of promo cards available, which add extra cards for the heroes in the two seasons of Dice Throne and also extra minions for Dice Throne Adventures.
The copies of Dice Throne and Dice Throne Adventures were provided by the publisher and Asmodee UK.
Have a tip, or want to point out something we missed? Leave a Comment or e-mail us at tips@techraptor.net