Dice Academy Preview

If you, like me, are a child of the seventies or eighties, you will probably remember with dewy-eyed affection the antics of the guy with the gun obsession, the woman with the high voice that was quite feisty behind the wheel of a car, the guy who could do sound effects, the one that was really tall and… Steve Guttenburg. Well, now’s the chance to relive…

(The game’s Dice Academy, not Police Academy)

Oh. Well, that’s even better. Police Academy would make an awful game.

Dice Academy, due to be released imminently, is a family game in the vein of Joe Name It (Gameswright) and Rory’s Story Cubes. It’s being published by Blue Orange Games, best known for King and Queendomino, both very playable, very pretty, very accessible and very fun family games, and the stunningly gorgeous Planet, a game where you get to build and populate your own planet in the space of an hour rather than several billion years, so you can be assured that this will be colourful, intuitive and family friendly, but compared to the other games, this will be a lot more portable.

So, No Hightower Then?

No, no Hightower. What you do get in Dice Academy is five letter dice and five theme dice. All 10 dice get rolled and the idea of the game is to match up a theme and letter with a word. So, if the theme was ‘City’ and the letter was ‘P’, you’d grab those two dice and announce ‘Paris!’ Only, you have to be careful that the colour of the dice and the colour of the theme don’t watch or else… no dice. Get it?

The themes range from specific things like cities, famous people and games to the more abstract like square shaped, liquid and something big – as you can imagine, this could lead to plenty of speculation about the physical and metaphysical nature of objects, but let’s keep it friendly (‘But glass is a liquid,’ ’let’s put your face through this window and find out,’ is not a conversation I expect to hear) – and the letters… are letters, distributed in such a way that there may well be colour clash, depending on what you roll. I really hope that the letter ‘F’ is on the same coloured dice as the ‘Sport’ theme. Mwah hah hah…

You get one point for each correct/acceptable pairing and the game can be adjusted to fit time constraints (10 points for a quick game, 20 for medium, 30 for long) or the point at which you think it might come to blows.

Might have to Call the Police...

Okay, stop it now. There are times when you just want a quick and easy to learn game, but you haven’t got enough space for Cobra Paw; if you’re a parent, you might have had juuuuuust enough of Dobble and want to step it up a bit; or you might be a teacher and can’t face another version of Story Cubes at the moment. Dice Academy might just do the job. Also… I spot a very pub-able game. Very pub-able indeed…

Dice Academy is available to pre-order right now!