Nerdful Things – Roll for it! Review
First Impressions
I opted for the deluxe edition as opposed to the regular – more dice to allow more players and more cards to use as well. The tin is a nice touch and the artwork is fantastic. The cards are all high quality and the deck is bountiful – lots of point-scoring options. The felt bag to store the dice is nice and the quality of the dice is on-point also. Basically, this game oozes quality and it’s well worth the money. It set me back £29.98 – a price I’d normally be put off by but after one game (detailed below) I am very impressed and the game is most definitely worth it.
The Description (sourced from BoardGameGeek)
The previous edition of Roll For It! by Calliope Games was for 2-4 players, and two sets could be combined to allow play for up to 8 players. This Deluxe edition supports 2-8 players out of the box.
Roll For It! is a casual, family-friendly dice and card game. Each player starts the game with six dice of a single color, and three target cards are laid face-up on the table. Players take turns doing the following: On a turn, a player rolls all of her dice not already on cards, then places any dice that match the targets on the corresponding cards. (Alternatively, before taking her turn, a player can first choose to reclaim all of her dice from all cards.)
If the player now fulfils the target with her dice – e.g., a pair of 3s, a quartet of 6s, or a specific combination of numbers – she claims the card, takes back her dice (and returns any other dice on the card to their owner), then places a new card on the table. Each card is worth a certain number of points. The first player to earn forty or more points wins!
Set Up
The set up is very minimal – always a good start. Each player selects their colour of dice and takes all six. The deck is shuffled and then placed face down and three cards are drawn and placed face up on the table. If their are five or more players, four cards are drawn and placed face up. To get started, each player rolls two of their dice and the highest score goes first and play continues in a clockwise fashion.
Gameplay
So, the aim of the game is to score the dice indicated on each card in the middle – this can be done in one go (if luck would have it) or you can place as many dice as you have against a card in the hope to win it in your next turn(s). Let’s say, for example, a card depicting six sixes is in play and I roll three sixes – I could place the three sixes by that card and end my turn. You can place your dice on multiple cards should you meet the cards requirements but you have to be strategic and not “spread yourself too thin” by allocating dice unnecessarily.
Using the example above with the six sixes, if I placed my three sixes by that card, I wouldn’t then want to place one (or more of my dice) by another card – unless I could win said card in which case I’d bank the points shown on the card as well as earn my dice back for my next turn.
At the start of a player’s turn, they can do a “take back” in which all of their dice on the table can be taken back and all six rolled in this turn.
Play continues until a player reaches forty points (or whatever score was decided upon at the start of the game). In our first game we aimed for one hundred points.
If you and another player have dice allocated to a card, it’s a battle of luck to see who gets the required dice to win the card – once done, all dice set against that card are returned to their respective players and a new card is drawn to take the place of the previously won card.
The points the cards are worth are shown in the bottom-right corner and range from two to fifteen points.
Verdict
We played this last night and the game lasted around forty-five minutes – it would have been finished (and won by me) in about twenty minutes if we played to forty points but we decided to make it a hundred. In the latter part of the game a lot of the cards were worth only two points so it was a bit of a grind and then we hit nothing but fifteen points (dice requirements were things like one to six or six sixes etc.) so the turns were very close to the bone and became as thrilling as it was infuriating – spending turns chipping away at the requirements only to have the card snatched from under you because Lady Luck favoured someone else.
So, in summary – set itself is great quality and the flocked interior of the tin acts as a dice tray so you don’t have to worry about rogue dice fleeing the table. The gameplay is simple yet addictive – while a lot of it is based on luck, there is an element of strategy in terms of picking which cards to allocate your dice to – do you go for the bigger wins which may consume turn after turn before it reaches fruition? Or do you go for the quicker (and ‘easier’ if luck is on your side) gains by banking the lower valued cards but turning them over quicker?
If you have family game nights or even if you’re looking for a warm-up before you start a big game sesh with your buddies, this game is definitely worth a look. It’s a fairly fast paced game that could be over in minutes or take a significant amount of time depending on how Lady Luck treats you.
If you already own it, what are your thoughts? If you end up buying it as a result of reading this, drop a comment below to let me know your thoughts!
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