Graham

There is nothing I dislike about this game, and it’s seen quite a few solo plays (~15 plays) and plays with my 10 year old kids (~10 plays). So in that sense, it’s a decent game.

The problem is that since buying Roll Through the Ages, it’s hard to see myself playing this again. Everything is a bit “cheaper” here — the score pad glue fell off, the score pad doesn’t have many sheets in it, the dice are nice enough but nothing special … Compare that to the large wooden dice, peg board, and huge, thick score pad that come with Roll Through the Ages and you can see what I mean.

In summary though, the game plays fairly well as long as you enjoy dice games and don’t care if luck is what steers you. It’s not a complex game and my kids have usually enjoyed this one to the end. They like planning where they are going to build the roads, and adding up each others’ points during the game to see “who is winning?”.

A light dice game using Yahtzee mechanics, for a low price, which is also portable — but it’s nothing special, and if you can afford Roll Through the Ages I would recommend it over Catan Dice for sure.

I will keep this short. I have only ever played this game Solo and it works very well. I love the Space Hulk theme, and the artwork on the cards is fantastic!

The rules are hard to learn and I had to watch a YouTube playthrough just to get a grasp on it. However, since then, I have played this game about 40 times. I like it. It’s much less effort to take out this small box and shuffle a few cards, than it is to unpack the boardgame Space Hulk and set up the entire map.

As with any game that uses a dice, sometimes you are going to roll badly and your Space Marines are going to get chewed up before you’ve even moved to the second location! Other times, you will feel like you’re landing all of your shots, and blasting a path through waves of Genestealers feels great! The designed has really managed to capture the feel or “vibe” of Space Hulk the boardgame!

My win rate is absolutely terrible, around 10%. Perhaps I’m just awful, but that’s definitely in keeping with the Space Hulk theme here. If it was easier to win, I wouldn’t enjoy winning …

I have all 4 expansions and randomly play with various ones — they were all quite cheap and add replayability to the game. I recommend this game for solo play, along with any of the expansions if you like the base game.

Purely from a singleplayer perspective, I find Pandemic to get fairly regular play in my rotation. It is fast and easy to set up (once you get used to how to create and shuffle the decks), plays smoothly without any analysis paralysis, and packs away just as quickly.

You always have a decision to make, even if it’s as simple as “I’ll send this guy over to Europe, and this lady down to Africa”. I usually control 3 roles, and find the game challenging. My win rate is about 40% playing on normal difficulty, which is great since it’s not too hard (like Space Hulk Death Angel), and not too easy (like Elder Sign).

Sometimes the cards just come out in a bad order and you simply can’t win, but you always feel like you have *some* control, and the amount of games that have come right down to the wire for me is impressive!

I have already had my money’s worth out of Pandemic, and I will keep pulling it out every couple of weeks because it’s still fun to see if I can “save the world” in under an hour! I recommend this game for solo play.

Taken as a light, simple-to-learn dice game, Martian Dice succeeds. It has been enjoyed by my kids from the very first time they saw the cute characters printed on the dice. The gameplay is easy to learn and provides just enough decision-making to keep the game enjoyable. Contrast this with Zombie Dice, in which the decisions that the player has to make are incredibly simple (should I roll again or not?). In Martian Dice, you are selecting which creature or UFO to keep, each time you roll the dice. You have to also consider how many dice you have left to keep rolling with, how many Tanks you have already rolled, how many UFOs you have already saved to defeat the tanks, where you stand in the points relative to the other players — it’s not complex, but it’s just enough to make it fun!

It is not always obvious which is the best strategy to take — for example, if my roll includes 4 chickens and 1 human, I will often take the 1 human because it leaves me more dice which could potentially be UFOs on the next roll. My kids (around 10 years old) will usually opt for the big haul of chickens. So there is some (albeit very basic) strategy here.

Given the choice between this and Zombie Dice, I will play this every time.

Disclaimer: I particularly enjoy rolling dice and I own a lot of dice games. Your mileage may vary.