What is the Game?

So Dice Throne is a battle game where you generally play 1 vs 1 in a dice chucking fantasy setting. It has some feel of a video game like Mortal Kombat. Your turns are spent upgrading your attacks, playing cards to heal, or manipulate your dice during attacks, and then your opponent rolling dice for their defense. It has a kind of Magic the Gathering flow with how the turns work, but this is a pure dice chucker. You can also play on teams, or with an odd number of players play King of the Hill where you attack one person and you can choose, but there is a benefit to attacking the person with the most healthy. The last character standing is the winner.

The Top 10

10 – Moon Elf

We start with a pretty easy character to play, the Moon Elf. They are one of the first ones that they recommend that you play, and they are just fun. I like that they give you a wide variety of tokens that you can use some of them help with the defensive side of things, like evasive, and others like blind and entangle are negative. I really think that the more defensive nature of the character is interesting. You really are looking to reduce damage a lot of the time when attacked versus others that are wanting to push out damage.

9 – Artificer

While the Moon Elf is a simpler character, the next two are going to be much more complex. The Artificer is all about building up three different robots and using them. or placing nanites on your enemy and then exploding them. There are a lot of moving pieces that you need to keep track of. But I like trying to figure out that puzzle, what to spend my synth on, which is what you use to build, activate and possibly use other abilities as well. The more you need to manage the more interesting it can be for me.

8 – Treant

Like I said, I like to manage a lot of things, but the Treant simplifies it a little bit from the Artificer, where it has seedlings that just grow every turn. And it also can heal a lot. But do you grow a seedling up to the largest level or do you keep them smaller and have more. There is certainly a puzzle to it as you have to decide at times between three things for how to use your seedlings. The Treant also has more ability to heal than a lot of other characters as well. They can put together a good defensive battle quite often.

7 – Ninja

Packaged with the Treant is the Ninja in the duel packs, and I have both in my Top 10. Now that’ll happen some more, but I’ve only gotten to play the Ninja with a physical copy recently. I like the abilities that the ninja has, the delayed poison adds a twist because it’s one of the few abilities that triggers at the end of a round. They aren’t the most defensive character, but a well times smoke bomb can be a big win for them. But I really like them because they can push the offense with the delayed poison and the ninjitsu.

6 – Shadow Thief

The Shadow Thief is a weird one and in a really good way. The Shadow Thief gets so much of it’s power from combat points. The combat points are normally just used to get cards into play, but the Shadow Thief generates damage based off how much CP it has and it can gain even more CP based off of attacks. It used to be able to steal a lot of CP from other players, but they have limited it now, it’s still a great time because it gives you so many options. I feel like the Shadow Thief is one of the most flexible characters.

5 – Vampire Lord

Now, some of the characters that heal, I don’t like that well. But the Vampire Lord makes it fun because they heal by draining others, as you’d expect. They have a lot of blood powers, and mesmerize which is a fun power. They also deal maybe smaller amounts of damage but there is a lot that’s undefendable which means that they can at times get more damage through consistently. Overall just a fun one to play, and I really like the ones that have powers or tokens that stack up and can do more the more that you have.

4 – Cursed Pirate

This is another one that is out there. All the characters have ways to upgrade your attack spots and defense, except for the Cursed Pirate side. The Cursed Pirate has a side and then a Ghost Pirate side that you can flip to. It has an interesting push your luck element to it as you want to become the Ghost Pirate but if you do, you start taking damage on your turn, and there is no going back. So it creates a timer, but the abilities on that side are better, so do you rush it and shoot for big hits or do you keep yourself just cursed and try and survive longer that way.

3 – Monk

The monk is probably the most defensive character on the list. They get Evasive that allows them to potentially take no damage. They have chi which will block damage, and they can cleanse negative affects off themselves. Again, that Chi gives them a resource that is interesting to use and gives them so much survivability in this game. The Monk can draw things out until you can upgrade a lot and get some big hits in of your own. Normally I don’t always love a ton of defense, but the monk is definitely interesting in how it does it.

2 – Pyromancer

So I go from a defensive character to a completely offensive character. On defensive rolls the Pyromancer can’t stop incoming damage, they can just deal damage back. And I think that it feels like a rush as you try and push out as much damage as possible and race to the end. They also give you fire mastery to mess around with. This again goes that resource management where you need to know how to spend them or when you should horde up more of them to get a bigger hit later. And while a lot of these resources that stack up add over time, the fire mastery reduces every turn so timing up the big hits is key.

1 – Gunslinger

Finally, number one, we have the Gunslinger. It is really close between the Gunslinger and the Pyromancer. The Gunslinger just feels like a jack of all trades. You can get bounty on people will will do more damage and I love the defense on the Gunslinger which is just a duel or a roll off that can greatly reduce damage. It feels so thematic, which all of the characters do, which is impressive for a dice chucking game.

Some of the characters I don’t have on the list are generally ones that I need to play more. The Huntress I think is very interesting, I just need to spend more time figuring out that character and her tiger pet which is really interesting. The Seraph and Paladin can both be more defensive as well. And the Tactician and Samurai I just haven’t played with enough. The Barbarian is fine as well, just more of a basic character, good for new players.

What is your favorite Dice Throne character?

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These rankings are the opinion of yours truly, and if you don’t like them, that’s okay. We all have different tastes in games and that is great. There are some games that I’ve only played as a demo, and I felt like I got enough of a feel to put them on the list, thanks GenCon for all the demos. These are living rankings so next year I’m sure that things will change, so I’ll probably be doing another one next year. Thanks to Board Game Geek for letting me enter/rate my collection and games I’ve played. Thanks to Pub Meeple for creating a tool that pulls in those games that I’ve rated and creating a ranking tool. Again, the numbers and names will be linked to Cool Stuff Inc and Amazon if you’re interested in the games.

80 – 7 Wonders
One of the things that makes 7 Wonders such an enjoyable game is the fact that it scales well. You actually can play it up to 7 people and it works well like that, and the same with lower player counts. In this game you are building up your society and trying to build one of the 7 wonders of the ancient world. To do this, you are drafting cards, building up your tableau, and scoring points in a lot of different ways at the end of the game. I have this lower than some other drafting games simply because the theme isn’t that exciting. Also, 7 Wonders encourages hate drafting, because if you don’t, science can be a run away strategy for a win.

79 – Risk Legacy
Regular Risk won’t be showing up on this list. That has player elimination and the game ends when someone controls the whole world. Risk Legacy, fixes some of that and gives you some fun stuff to open. In the game you play one of several factions who are trying to take over this new planet. But instead of wiping everyone off the board, you just need to get enough points. Generally, this is done by taking over a couple of the HQ’s that your opponents control, but there are other missions as well that can give you points. This keeps the game time much lower and when or if you are knocked off the board, you can come back on your following turn, probably won’t win, but you won’t just be sitting there. As compared to other legacy games, this doesn’t have story, but it doesn’t need it and it’s enjoyable to play without it.

78 – Dice Throne: Season 2 Cursed Pirate and Artificer
There will be more of this game higher on the list, and I could have maybe clumped it all together. But this is stand alone that you can play yourself. The reason that I have this one a bit lower is that while they are a ton of fun to play, they are also a bit more complex. So I don’t know that they would be the two that I’d pull out for beginners. Dice Throne, which will continue to show up throughout, is a Yahtzee style dice game, but instead of using those combos of dice to score points, you’re using them to defeat your opponent in 1 on 1 battles, 3 player free for alls, or you can team up. The game plays pretty fast and is generally easy to understand, though, as I said, these two characters are a bit more complex. I consistently have a good time when I get it to the table.

77 – Mysterium
There has been a murder in this deduction based game. In it, most of the people are playing investigators who are trying to determine who committed a murder, but to figure it out, they need clues. These clues as to who, how, and where are being given to you by another player, the ghost, who can only send you visions. This means that the ghost is giving you some cards that you are then comparing to, lets say early game, different possible murders, and you are trying to interpret these cards to determine who your murderer is, and each player is trying to find a different one. It’s a fun almost party game where there’s more going on than your traditional matching a word or image to another word or image. The spooky theme works, and we’ve house ruled a little bit with how the end of the game works, because it tries to keep it competitive to some extent, but those rules just slow down the game and don’t add to the enjoyment.

76 – Gloom
Not Gloomhaven. In Gloom you are telling the story of your family. But this isn’t a nice and happy family, this is a family that you want to die off. In fact, you want them to die off being as unhappy as they can be, because that’s how you win the game. On your turn you play a card either on one of your people, telling the story of how something bad happened to them or on someone else’s characters telling how something got better for them. While there is definitely scoring and a winner at the end of the game, the biggest part of the game is telling stories that twist together as to why your characters are getting more and more miserable, and just the humor that comes out of that. A cool part of the game is that as you are playing down the cards, you play them on top of the character, but you can still see the character since the cards you’re playing down are see through. So you can see how they have been made miserable before. It plays best when people are into the story telling, but most often people have been.

75 – Codenames: Pictures
I do not like Codenames, if you are expecting it to be the list, you won’t find it there. Codenames, with words, tends to be an anti-party game. People just sit around and look at the cards thinking, whereas with pictures, it encourages more discussion, because of the weird artwork. In Codenames Pictures, you are split into two teams, each team having a clue giver and guessers. The clue givers give a one word clue and a number. The number is the number of the pictures the clue relates to. Then the guessers are trying to figure out which ones match and make guesses on that. The first team to get all of their images guessed wins, but there’s more. If you guess the opposing teams, they get that as a correct guess. And if you guess the assassin, your team loses, so you have to think about that as the clue you’re going to give. It gives some clever moments for guessing, and some clever moments for giving a clue when you can tie a large number of the images together. The added discussion makes this game much more enjoyable than the original in my opinion, and you don’t run into a situation where someone might not know what a word means.

74 – Shadows of Brimstone: City of the Ancient
This is a game that I really need to play more. It was one of the first campaign games that I got and I’ve enjoyed the little play I have gotten of it. This game is a big box game with minis that need to be put together, but once you’ve done all that and learned the rules, which there are a lot, you start a dungeon crawl through the weird west. This wild west combined with monsters and other dimensions really gives this game a pretty unique theme that I’d love to see more of. What keeps this game from being at the table more is that it’s a beast to get to the table and at this point in time it’s been long enough that I’d have to spend the time to relearn the rules as well. But the unique t heme and the fact that I really like campaign style and dungeon crawl games, Shadows of Brimstone is a game that I’ve kept and that I’ll probably keep on my shelf for a long time, even if it isn’t played too often.

73 – Quoridor
This is a pretty straight forward abstract game that I really like at 4 players. In the game, you are racing from one side of the board to the other. Your opponents are doing the same thing from other sides of the boards. What makes this game interesting is that you can block off peoples routes with a few boards that you have. When doing that you can’t block them from the side of the board that they need to get to. What I like about this game is that I can see how it’s going to work fairly into the game. Now, I don’t win all that often because my wife tends to make it her mission to keep me from winning, but it’s still fun being able to see how you can up walls in such a way and cause other people to do the same thing so that your path stays clearer. It’s also a very fast game, even with some thinky decisions in there.

72 – First Martians: Adventures on the Red Planet
This game I was super excited for because it was going to be like Robinson Crusoe, which I own but haven’t played, in space, with an app. And I feel like it fell a bit flat for me compared to what it could have been. I still really enjoy this game, but it was hyped up a ton, and it didn’t live up to that. In this game you are on Mars trying to keep your base up and running while also completing whatever missions you need to, plus the app causes things to happen and things to break down on your base. It works well, but the app part only works okay. It’s a bit clunky, and the game itself has a lot of bits to keep track of. There is a campaign aspect to the game that I haven’t played yet, but there are a lot of fun one off games you can play as well that seem challenging, though I have had pretty good luck on them. I think that with the house keeping in the game, just keeping track of everything working and how things break down, it might be a bit much for some people, but I enjoy it.

71 – Near and Far
This game is interesting because it balances some tough mechanics with an interesting world building and story element to the game. In it, you play through a campaign on maps where you are finding out the story of the world, but also building up your engine so that you’re able to go out and exploring and find more story. The game looks amazing with great art work. The game, though, because it has the more game mechanics and the story aspect, can seem like there is almost too much to do. I enjoy the complexity of the mechanics and planning ahead, but it won’t be for everyone in a story game and there is a lot to teach for that. I’ve played through a few different scenarios and I’ve always enjoyed it and the fact that a decision in a story at one point can lead you down a different branch at another point is a lot of fun and makes the world seem much more like it is living.

There’s another 10 done, still a lot to go, but thank you for staying around with my list. I hope that you’re enjoying it, are there any standout games on it thus far that you love or that you really want to play?

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