In this post I'm picking out some bits from the latest Dice Tower output that has interested me.

While watching this weeks Boardgame Breakfast in the news section of the show it was mentioned that Days of Wonder had released a solo variant for the game.

I own the game. I've played it once since getting it. I like the game despite the temper tantrum by one of the other players (that was a first). I'm hoping to get the game to the table with the Fenland Gamers. But in the meantime this new solo mode should help me reach that Five Tribes itch.

While you are over at the Days of Wonder page for Five Tribes look at the other goodies they have there for the game. Some nice little surprises there, I should of visited their site earlier.

Get your Five Tribes goodies HERE

The Dice Tower also reported that AEG have announced the first expansion for Dice City. Despite Jonathan handing me my butt in this game, I still enjoyed playing this game. So I'm looking forward to this expansion coming out.

In the Tom Thinks section this week, Tom makes his annual ten predictions for the coming year in the games industry. One of those was about Magic the Gathering Arena of the Planeswalker. Tom's prediction was that this game would disappear because of lack of backing for the game by Hasbro. I would and this is with a heavy heart have to agree with Tom. Which is a shame, because this game with its great price, potential for organise play, could be huge. The crime is the lack of support from Hasbro.

This game needs expansions, it needs to allow the team/squad building. But that only comes when you have a pool of spells etc to choose from. That pool comes from expansions. There also needs to be more terrain pieces made available, maybe a specific terrain expansion. The pieces you get with the base game is nothing but stingy. I know why they did this to keep the price down. I also know yes you can buy old Heroscape terrain to use with the game. But this needs Hasbro to man up, and make some available with the Magic name. It sends a powerful message to the consumer.

Hopefully Hasbro are looking at the FFG playbook for games like Imperial Assault (a far more expensive competitor). Since that came out a year ago, we have seen two big expansions, and four waves of “character” expansions. There has been a World Campionships, three or four organised play kits for stores. Why are we not seeing this from Hasbro? They have the infrastructure already for the organised play side with Magic the Gathering.

Hasbro are certainly frustrating.

Finally yesterday the annual Dice Tower Kickstarter kicked off. It has already reached its funding target in the first twenty four hours. There are some nice promo sets as backer rewards. Each promo set is made up of promos for a number of separate games. There is at least one promo in each of the promo sets available that I'd like. But because of the way the rewards are structured to get all the promo sets it would cost me about $250. Which yes the main point of the Kickstarter is to help fund the channel, and not about the rewards. However if I went with that tier of support I'd be left with a lot of unwanted promos. Yes I could eBay the stuff but that's effort! Or I could hope the promos I want form the sets are available to buy separately later on. Or possible I could try trading the promos I don't want for ones I do.

Luckily for me the promo set with the most promos I'd use is set A. That's the $60 tier. It would be nice to be able to select which set you wanted at this tier, or any of the tiers between this and the “All of them” tier.

My ideal would be to be able to select the promos I want to make up my set, but that is a LOT of extra effort for the Dice Tower team.

Anyway apart from that little moan, the Dice Tower is a great channel, putting out a lot of free content over the year for gamers. You can show your support for the Dice Tower HERE.

Posted by me using my iPad and the Blogsy app