TelevisionTalks – Afterschool Dice Club Episode 3: Not Alone
It’s been a while since I’ve reviewed an episode of Afterschool Dice Club. It’s mainly because I was doing end of year things, but I figured I should, while it’s still fairly fresh in my mind, get back to the episodes that I’ve watched. As a quick refresher, Afterschool Dice Club is about a girl who is quiet who gets befriended by another girl who is all about excitement and adventure, and they stumble across the class rep working at a game store. This is a very episodic anime where they talk about games and have some story going on with it.
In this episode, they are at the Aya’s house, the girl who has befriended Miki to play a game of Incan Gold (or Diamant). However, Miki starts to have a strange feeling with Aya’s older sisters friend joins them and is aggressive about playing the game. It reminds Miki of one of the times as a child that she was bullied and with the help of her friends she stands up against the bullying in the game. The game itself is a push your luck sort of game, so in the end Miki’s nerves of steel end up with her getting more gems, but only after she’s stepped out of her comfort zone and, with her friends at her back, pushed her luck just a little bit further. It turns out, though, that the reason she remembered Aya’s older sisters friend was that, in the situation where she was being bullied, that person had been the one to scare away the bullies and rescue her.
I think that this episode, as compared to some of the others, did a bit better job creating a twist at the end and creating some development for Miki. In the previous two episodes, she’s mainly stayed the same but has been brought out of her shell a little bit. in this one, she had to push past something, not only in her past, but in her current personality where she would have normally folded to the pressure of the more aggressive player. While I’m not sure that this carried on extremely well into the next episode, it was a well done episode and created a better story than some of them.

Incan Gold or Diamant are a game about pushing your luck to get the most gems. However, if two of the same monster ever show up, those left in the temple don’t get to leave with anything. So you have to play the odds, because everyone who stays in gets a share of the treasure. You don’t want someone to get too far ahead early in the game because it’ll require you to push your luck more at the end of the game to try and catch up. The twist on that is that the gems are hidden, so you might have a general idea of what people have, but unless you’re really good at counting cards, you’re not going to know everything.
Looking at this episode, I think it teaches a couple of interesting things. The first being that people should watch their game personas and read the table. In the episode, the friend is loud and aggressive in how she plays and it makes Miki uncomfortable at the table because of things in her life outside of the game. So there needs to be some need to read the table and know how your group plays or how a group that you’re joining plays. I think we also get to see how board games and real life do often intersect for people. The easy example is of someone being bullied, but people can throw fits if they don’t get the what they wanted in a game because they always do in real life, or not believe that they are wrong because they have been told they aren’t wrong or that they are perfect in the real world. I feel like that’s been a common theme of the show as they do a good job of pairing the games with what’s going on in the rest of the episode. But I feel like that’s something that can be overlooked in actual gaming, especially by gamers, because I want to play a game all the time as escapism and just for the challenge, but for other people are game might be something new or something that has other memories attached to it.
Overall, I think that this episode does a better job of being more than just what was expected. I don’t think that it is amazing in terms of storytelling and plot, but there are some cool things. But I am still enjoying the concept of the show and as someone who loves board games, it’s fun to see it more in the culture and games that I haven’t played, because there are so many out there you can’t play them all.
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