When I first saw Pina Coladice I realised it combines two of my favourite past times, drinking cocktails and playing board games. This made it an instant win from me so I had to pick it up to try a game.
Aperitifs
This was a pretty nice small box to get into and the components are great at continuing the theme. There’s 4 different colours of player’s tokens, each designed as a different type of cocktail, the dice are a nice shade of cool ice blue that makes them seem almost like ice cubes and the tiles for forming the playing board are basically drink coasters, although I need to make sure I don’t lapse my thinking and rest my drink on them!
When I first saw Pina Coladice I realised it combines two of my favourite past times, drinking cocktails and playing board games. This made it an instant win from me so I had to pick it up to try a game.
Aperitifs
This was a pretty nice small box to get into and the components are great at continuing the theme. There’s 4 different colours of player’s tokens, each designed as a different type of cocktail, the dice are a nice shade of cool ice blue that makes them seem almost like ice cubes and the tiles for forming the playing board are basically drink coasters, although I need to make sure I don’t lapse my thinking and rest my drink on them!
Martinis
The rules for Pina Coladice are fairly simple to get down. The board is laid out in a 4×4 grid, there’s more tiles than needed so the rest sit out of play. Each tile is double sided with room for one or two player tokens, the player count determines how many of the tiles are flipped to the back side. The game resolves around Yahtzee style mechanics, on your turn you roll the dice then choose to keep or re-roll as many as you want twice, then finally take your end result and use it to place one of your tokens on an empty tile space. These could require a range of results – from having a pair of 1s, to a straight run of dice or even the total of all dice having to be close to an exact number. Place a token if you can, score the points listed on the tile, then pass the dice to the next player to take their turn. The game will last until someone runs out of tokens, passes a score of 20 or makes a 4 in a row on the board.
Rum Punch
Gameplay for Pina Coladice plays quick each turn, only needing three rolls of the dice and a possible token placement. To start with the board is wide open so you’ll have many options available to aim for, you might get lucky and be able to play from your first roll without chancing more rolling. However, the more trickier the requirements on the tile the more points you’ll get for placing down your token, so you may want to push your luck a little. However, the requirement to place down a token is mandatory if available, so you may need to be careful as gambling might leave you having to place a token for less points than you could have had, or in a bad location, as another thing to consider when placing is the different end gane conditions. In two of the three cases the round plays out to finish before determining the winner by whiever has the most points, whereas the third condition for having a 4-in-a-row on the board not only stops the game immediately but then also declares that player the outright winner, regardless of anyone’s score.
Whiskey Sour
Pina Coladice is fairly straightforward but comes with the extra Happy Hour variant. This is an extra tile that gets passed around with the dice that can be used if the player can’t place a token that round, on which case they roll a single die and take the result displayed, this could have any effect such as gaining or losing points, flipping tiles or even removing tokens. A nice extra, as it helps to mitigate bad rolls by always offering a reward (well maybe I should say always get an action, I wouldn’t call some of those rewards).
Old Fashioned
So Pina Coladice is one of those games with different ways to win enabling players to deploy different strategies and meaning that you shouldn’t end up with a runaway leader scenario as there’s (almost) always a chance of another player mounting a comeback victory, no matter how far behind they are. This means the game actually comes with more strategy than it first appears, sure someone can get good rolls and nap all the highest scoring spaces, but if they don’t pay attention then another player might choose their placements more carefully and could sneak in their 4th token to reveal it completes their line, which I’ve seen happen in the games.
The one main thing to remember is that this is a dice game, so there will always be a large luck element added which you might not be able to overcome, a simple pair of 4s might win you the game and yet you roll 15 dice and don’t see a single one. It’s nice that they have the extra variant so even on down turns you don’t feel like going home empty handed, but sometimes if your luck is bad this doesn’t make it any better! I do think the variant is needed though, with the option of token removal it allows an alternate way to prevent someone else getting the instant victory, but does come with the involved risk. It also does allow the possibility for players to pick on one person, but hopefully that would be the leader and we’ll deserved.
Finally, each tile comes with a different type of cocktail ingredient on it, while it has no in game effect it does provide all the details in the rules of each so the winning player can use all their tiles ingredients to craft their winning cocktail, just a fun option added for those creative minds, and I guess for fun you might decide to only win by scoring your favourite cocktail!
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