Yet another crowdfunding project with a gimmicky gizmo caught my eye this morning. It also helped that Pivotal Roll—Rogue Lords has a somewhat punny name—what can I say? I’m shallow!

The gimmick is the die, for two reasons: first, each face has 4 symbols, representing different actions to be taken by the up to 4 members of your squad. The orientation of the face at the top of the die indicates which action corresponds to which member, which leads on to the die’s second feature…

It’s magnetic. The justification for this is that you need the die to be clearly aligned with your squad cards so there’s no ambiguity with which action corresponds with which squad member. The edge of game board appears to contain iron or similar for the die to snap on to, thus aligning it accurately.

Pivotal Roll is described as ‘A SOLO tactical board game where one die controls your entire squad. Pivot the die, change your commands, outthink every fight.’ This is a campaign preview, so there’s not a huge amount of other information about the game.

You seem to be able to choose from a number of opponents with their collection of ‘minions,’ and somehow select a number of members of your own squad to battle these minions. Both minions and your soldiers are arranged in 2 × 2 grids, corresponding to the layout of the die faces. On each turn, you roll the die and let the soldiers take the actions indicated by their quadrant of the die’s top face. Then there’s something about rotating the die, though it’s not clear if this is before taking the actions or in addition (i.e., you get to take actions multiple times). After rotations and actions, your opponent uses the die in the same way, in whatever orientation you last left it—which all sounds a bit confusing.

One of the project updates says something about the game mechanics, but I’m afraid I didn’t end the page knowing more than when I started.

That Die

Pivotal Roll’s Gamefound page talks about ‘creat[ing] a new game system’ and proclaims that ‘it’s a new way to use a die.’ Let’s unpack that…

The 4 quadrants per face idea is interesting: it means you have not 6 outcomes per roll but 24. However, you could get almost the same effect with 4 standard dice (depending on how well the distribution of symbols on the game’s die match that of 4 separate dice), and rotating the single die is roughly the same as changing the order of the 4 normal ones.

Incidentally, a spinner with 4 pointers could do just the same too, and might be more flexible in that it could be designed to have more than 6 combinations of values, whereas moving from a D6 to, say, a D8 would be tricky since Pivotal Roll’s mechanism requires dice faces to be square.

As for dice magnetism, the game’s creator, Mapapa, seems to have admitted in the campaign’s comment section that they’re reconsidering this option. Aligning the die by eye or having a suitable shaped holder for it to land in would probably be sufficient.

If you take away the magnets and replace the quadrants with something simpler, what’s left? It’s difficult to tell given the small amount of information on the campaign page.

Having said that, the quadrant face is a nice touch, and I could imagine different player (or enemy) characters having dice with different distributions of actions on each face. E.g., a berserker squad might have a die with a lot of attack actions appearing together on some faces of the die and clusters of null actions on others, representing frenzied attacks vs recovery periods, respectively; or a more balanced squad might intersperse attacks with healing on all faces. Or you might be able to acquire more dice as the game proceeds, and choose the one you think will work best in any given situation.

Those sorts of things would be more awkward—though not impossible—to do with multiple standard dice or a spinner.

Final Words

Given the picture above, there’s a lot more to this game than I’ve said here, but the Gamefound page is frustratingly lacking in details.

The comments section suggests the designer is having difficulties in bringing everything together: besides the note about magnets that I mentioned above, it seems the plan was to start the campaign mid-November, but it looks like it’s being pushed back into next year.

I’ve said elsewhere that I want a campaign to have clear and precise details about a game before I’ll touch it—rulebook and/or playthrough at the very least. This project has none of that, but I’m going to be keeping an eye on it for at least a little while to see how the quadrant die develops.

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.