Go on, admit it, you’ve always wanted to be a mad scientist with a laboratory filled with bubbling liquids, killer robots and overly complicated devices. Haven’t you? Oh, maybe it’s just me. Oh well, moving on…
Kickstarter project, Dicey Devices: Mad Ambition could be the game for any of us who do want to channel our inner Dr Doofenshmirtz or to be Gru when we grow up. In Origami Whale’s 45–90 minutes game for 1–4 players, you compete to be the last mad scientist standing.
Let me start by saying there’s a lot—and I mean a lot—of stuff in the Dicey Devices box, so much that the rulebook’s contents list spans two pages: 4 player boards and weapon boards, a shared scrapyard board, 5 different dice, 4 Igors, 4 batteries, 4 death rays, 4 scrap counters, 40 bots (alas, just coloured cubes, unlike the Igors, batteries and death rays), 45 other cubes, 5 Igor blueprints, 9 sector modifiers, 6 character cards, 10 prototype device cards, 7 special device cards, 12 starter device cards, 51 basic device cards, and on and one the list goes. With that much material, it’s a safe bet that you’ll have to work hard in this game.
The game overview from the manual says, ‘In Dicey Devices you’ll be using your robots, laboratory, and trusty assistant Igor to build and upgrade your death ray to incapacitate your rivals, but watch out! Incapacitated players may be restored to health and use their own death rays to wreak vengence [sic]! Can you be ingenious enough, mad enough, and plucky enough to be the last mad scientist standing?’ So, it seems ‘death ray’ is a bit of a misnomer, but on the plus side, players won’t be eliminated from the game, just incur a penalty in terms of what they can do during their next turns.
Playing the Game
Your aim is to collect devices from the central scrapyard, bring them back to your laboratory to assemble into various colour combos which go towards building and upgrading your death ray, and then you shoot that at other players. The game ends when all but one player has been incapacitated.
Glossing over many details, you perform these six actions on your turn:
· Revive—if you’ve been zapped, you (or rather, your Igor) can take steps to revive you. Roll two dice and if the values are the same, hey presto, you’re back on your feet; if not, you can choose to pay six scrap points to revive, but if you can’t or don’t want to pay, you remain incapacitated and unable to use your death ray.
· Blast—if you’re not incapacitated and your death ray is fully built, you can shoot it (possibly at the person who incapacitated you seven turns ago, you know who I mean, don’t you, Michael?). Choose a person and roll the appropriate die or dice depending on the strength of your laser; the target player rolls their single die and higher wins. If you’re victorious and the target has shields (represented by charge cubes on their shield space), they lose one, otherwise they become incapacitated and their Igor must remain by their side until they recover.
· Lab—here you get to accumulate some resources and gain devices. The player board—laboratory, I mean—has 12 spaces designated device or machine sections; you get to activate one of these with your battery, plus one or two more using dice. Roll two dice and choose whether to combine their values to activate one section, or split them to activate two, or bank one (i.e., save it to add to a later die roll) and use the other for activation. When you activate a section, you gain the indicated resource (scrap, charge cube or bot) from that section and all others to the left of it. Some device cards trigger actions when activated, such as destroying an opponent’s bot. (Some also have actions which trigger when acquired, in the Collection phase below.)
· Collection—the same dice activate sectors in the scrapyard corresponding to their numbers, and players who have a presence in that sector (i.e., not necessarily you) can gain a scrap point or purchase a device card from the sector (at the cost of scrap points), returning a bot or Igor back to the laboratory and placing the card in the appropriate empty section. If the new device completes one or more colour combos, your death ray can be upgraded.
· Deployment—optionally send bots to spaces in the scrapyard or move Igor between his action points.
· Cleanup—laboratory maintenance, refilling empty card slots and optionally swapping a pair of devices in your laboratory.
I’ve simplified a lot, and that’s without even mentioning the ‘advanced’ cards, but I hope you’ve gained an idea of how the game is played.
There are also two different solo modes, though details about them are scant. One appears to involve an automa playing as another character in a two-player head-to-head. The other is described as an immersive story unfolding ‘across multiple episodes, each with its own narrative twists’ and seems to be a sort of campaign mode.
Besides the basic game, a Clone Pack mini-expansion is available on Kickstarter, containing ‘clone vats,’ which enable you to create extra copies of yourself to send to the scrapyard. There’s also a rather odd Lunchbox Special, with new locations to visit, new bot types, device cards and abilities, all packed in, er, a metal lunchbox.
Wrap Up
I love Dicey Devices’ retro art style and the sheer silliness of the mad scientist devices. The game does seem a little fiddly in its complexity, but that might be something easily remedied in subsequent drafts of the rulebook.
You can find out more on the project’s page, including a copy of the rule book.
About the Author:
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
