Thursday 30 August 2018

BOARD GAME REVIEW: HARVEST DICE

Harvest Dice is from a genre of games that seems to be gaining in popularity recently. These are Roll 'n Write games, where you roll some dice (or draw cards or some other randomizer) and then use the results to mark a sheet of paper depending on different criteria for final scoring.

Harvest Dice has a farming theme. In it, you are drafting dice to fill in a grid with three vegetables. Atternatively, you can feed unusable dice to the pig to build up a bonus track to manipulate dice. At the end of the round, one unused dice that is left increases the points earned from that type of vegetable.

It is a pretty simple game. It is a spatial optimisation puzzle on your paper. However, the market mechanic means there is a good amount of interaction. This also leads to some good decisions because to increase the scoring of a vegetable means (by necissity) having less of that vegetable on your pad.

This is a very simple game. Even the "advanced" variant isn't too hard. In addition to this, the game is fairly inexpensive. My normal complaint here is I would prefer laminated sheets and dry-erase markers over sheets of paper. However, for the price, I am quite happy to simply laminate my own when my supply of game sheets runs low. 

Overall, I really enjoyed this game. It had a nice market mechanic that gives indirect interaction and led to hard decisions, even in the solo mode. While not the deepest of games, it is easy to teach and set-up and is allot of game in a small package. It is also a great travel game to take around.

4 out of 5 harvesting waffles.

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