Thieves is a 2-player abstract dice game where each player is a group of thieves competing to steal the dragon’s gold and get out.
A Very Pretty Game
I have to applaud the production value of Thieves. The box is striking with its austere black and gold imagery. The dice are decent, the player tokens are nice wooden pieces, and the gold is a chunky metal coin.
The board is colourful and incredibly sturdy. It also has a felt underside that does a great job of gripping the table.
Great quality components
Let’s Play
Setup for this game is almost instantaneous, so there’s no need to go into much detail. Each player sits on opposite sides of the board, with the dragon symbol on their bottom right. They place their tokens on the four white squares on their bottom left. The treasure is placed in the centre of the board.
And we’re ready...
Gameplay is almost as simple. Each player takes turns rolling the two dice and using the results to move their tokens.
Four of the sides on the dice are the four colours of the squares on the board. They allow you to move one of your tokens through a space of that colour to the white space on the other side. One side is white; this can be used as any colour. The last side is black; this is used to take the gold, pass the gold to an accomplice, or leave the board to win the game. The dice can only be used to move a particular token once per turn.
Where the game gets interesting is that you MUST use all the dice you can. If you roll a Purple and the only purple space is in the wrong direction, back you go. If you roll black, you have to pass the gold you’re carrying to someone else if you can (luckily you can’t pass to your opponent).
This creates an extra layer of chaos that can be fun but also frustrating. You can be left in one spot holding the treasure, waiting for a good roll while your opponent rolls two blacks to steal the gold from you and pass it on to an accomplice. Other times you roll a series of great results and swarm your opponent. There’s usually enough options available that you can do less useful moves rather than actively bad ones, but not always.
There are rules for valid and invalid moves, which are explained in the rulebook… kind of. I’ll explain later.
These restrictions help to keep the game far more interactive than it looks. A key restriction is that a token can only be moved once per turn. This means if you steal the gold from another player, you can usually only get at most one space away. Your opponent still has a chance to catch up and steal it back. Also, having to use all the dice you can means you often have to stay where you are (or even have to make a bad move) making it easier to get in each other’s way.
This is how the game can go. White is going to have problems getting the treasure past black
The game ends when a player has carried the gold to their bottom right space, they have an accomplice in one of the three spaces around it, and they roll black to step off the board.
"I know all those words, but that sentence makes no sense to me"
For such a simple game, the short rulebook is surprisingly opaque. As an example, the rules for not being able to use a die are:
Players will not always be able to use the keys the dice give them:
• If the pathways behind available doorways are occupied
• If they do not have the keys for the available doorways
In these situations, they lose the opportunity for action in that turn.
What they mean is that the die with no eligible use is skipped, but it reads like you miss your turn if you can’t use both dice. This is in the update rulebook available online; the physical version is even more prohibitive sounding with “However, players will not always be able to use the keys the dice give them, and in these situations they lose their turn”. I had to search for how to play videos to clarify this to mean your turn ends as soon as you have no usable dice.
Add to this the odd rulebook layout, with setup placed before the lore of the game, followed by some unintuitive splitting of the rules between sections. The rules for movement are in a separate section from the rules for which moves are prohibited, which are in a different section from what to do if the only possible move is prohibited. Pretty much any question you might have could be in one of multiple areas. It’s a bit messy.
Lore and Disorder
Thieves is a great-looking game with an interesting story, but it’s fundamentally just too random to be reliably fun.
We’ve had great games where we’ve been chasing the gold from one side of the board to the other, grabbing the gold and passing it to an accomplice, running interference, but a well-placed opponent manages to snatch it back. Then again, we’ve had games where one player kept rolling white and just strolled to the exit with nothing the opponent could do but shuffle around in circles. I don’t mind losing by being unlucky, but there’s often so little agency in the game it sometimes feels like a coin toss in slow motion.
I suspect the issue is that it’s straddling too many demographics. The art, theme, and components appeal to more mature players, but the gameplay is unlikely to click for them. The simpler gameplay would be attractive to casual players, but the dark and abstract artwork means it’s unlikely to catch their eye, and the vague rulebook will likely scare them away. The quick and chaotic experience would be a fun party game, but it’s only for two players.
Is it fun? Sometimes. Is it frustrating? Also sometimes. I would definitely say it’s worth a play, but I don’t think I can recommend buying it.
