My Top Ten Dice Rolling Games

I am such a weak willed person. It didn’t help that a game reviewer on Instagram that I respect said that he had been enjoying these lists on there. So blame him, not me. I was going to let it go for a while.

Who doesn’t like chucking dice? There is something really satisfying about rolling dice. The rattling around in your hand, and then the noise they make as they hit a hard surface.

Here are “My Top Ten Dice Rolling Games”…

  1. (Top 100 position – 2) T.I.M.E Stories
  2. (Top 100 position – 3) Star Wars: Destiny
  3. (Top 100 position – 7) Istanbul
  4. (Top 100 position – 12) Mechs vs. Minions
  5. (Top 100 position – 14) Glen More
  6. (Top 100 position – 16) Memoir ’44
  7. (Top 100 position – 20) Zombicide
  8. (Top 100 position – 21) Run, Fight, or Die!
  9. (Top 100 position – 26) The Others
  10. (Top 100 position – 27) Roll for the Galaxy

I had to go look at my copy of Glen More. Dice Rolling? Really? I think it really is stretching it. Ok you are using the special die to simulate an extra player in a two or three player game (I had to go back and check this out, my memory isn’t great). But still it’s not the first mechanic that would come to mind for this game.

I’d also nearly say the same for Istanbul. I wouldn’t describe it as a main mechanic for the game. But a ‘side’ mechanic which you could go through the whole game not using if you don’t visit the couple of tiles that use the dice.

There are some great dice rolling games in this list. I love the mechanic in The Others. You can be rolling an insane amount of dice in this game, especially as the sin. I love the Yahtzee push your luck element in Run,Fight, or Die!

It’s funny how four of the games use the dice as a mechanic to resolve combat but there is no roll mitigation. Your roll is what it is. Which is interesting.

Star Wars: Destiny is all about the dice rolling. It keeps that luck, random element of the dice, but you are able to mitigate the rolls to get a ‘favorable’ result. You can always discard a card to re-roll, and hope you get the side you want. There are also cards that allow you to do a similar thing with your or an opponents dice. But there are cards and abilities that allow you to set dice to a side of your choice, or of a specific symbol. However you have to make the decision to include these cards in your deck or not. Which I kind of like. You get to decide (faction allowing) how much mitigation you have.

I love how dice are used in Roll for the Galaxy. The action selection, as a resource, the mitigation so that you are able to take the action you want to do, but at a cost. They really did use the dice well in this game to stream line Race for the Galaxy.

2 thoughts on “My Top Ten Dice Rolling Games

  1. Really sorry to see some of these games in this list as the core mechanic is not dice-rolling at all, or even the point of the game. Istanbul? Really? Glen More? Come on. At some point in these lists you have to make a human judgement. Those two are NOT dice-rolling games.

    I know you acknowledge this yourself, but it seems that this list is completely off-base with those additions and makes a mockery of those titles – they are simply not dice games (they just include dice). And just because a game includes a die or dice, they cannot be lumped as a dice-rolling game.

    I don’t know how you can do it, but perhaps your script needs a bit of work to filter out those games where the mechanic is only a tiny part of the game (and not the main mechanic).

    1. Well that’s the thing you can’t script it. It would require going in and editing the database. Which for me isn’t too hard to do or a massive job. But it does show a bigger problem with the bgg database and what information they record against a game.
      The only way I can see a solution that could be coded for bgg is they have two mechanic fields, main mechanics and secondary ones.

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