Dice are one of the best sources of drama in board games. They focus risk and tension into a single moment that acts as the culmination of strategic decision. The kinetic force of tossing hunks of plastic or wood and watching them tumble across the table is delightful. Ultimately, it’s wonderful to have a pleasing physical action peppered throughout an otherwise mental exercise.
As board games have matured, so have the use of dice. They’re no longer just the focus of simple tabletop games such as Yahtzee or Craps. The hobby has evolved to include sophisticated and bedazzling systems focused on these randomizers (like roll and write games, for instance), and there’s been no better time to get up out of your seat and roll the bones.
TL;DR: The Best Dice-Rolling Games
- Ready Set Bet
- L.L.A.M.A. Dice
- Bang! The Dice Game
- Dice Forge
- Rolling Thunder: Vendetta
- Dice Throne
- Grand Austria Hotel
- King of Monster Island
- Pandemic: The Cure
- Sagrada
- Too Many Bones
Ready Set Bet
There is something undeniably thrilling about watching a group of horses blast down a track at full speed. Ready Set Bet brings the allure of horse racing to the tabletop, with all of the action hinged on a pair of dice. One player effectively works as a moderator and announcer. They roll two dice which correspond to 9 horses positioned on a small cardboard track. The horse rolled is moved forward on the track, edging towards the finish line. The twist here is that the announcer keeps rolling. Over and over. As fast as they can.
This game is a flurry of chaos. As the announcer is rolling they’re shouting out the horse that moves, perhaps embellishing emphatically and hamming it up. Everyone else at the table is placing bets on a large mat, all in real-time as the race commences. You can bet on the actual horses, or you can place more esoteric prop bets such as the seven horse finishing ahead of the four, five, and six. This is a party game, one full of energy and furious dice rolling.
L.L.A.M.A. Dice
L.L.A.M.A. Dice (also published under the title Don’t L.L.A.M.A. Dice) is a simple push-your-luck game that combines card play with dice rolling in a light-hearted fling. The goal is for the three dice you toss to match number cards splayed in front of you. This allows you to ditch these cards and avoid collecting points.The tension here is in whether you want to keep going and risk not rolling a result that matches one of your cards. In this case, you must grab a new one from the central row, worsening your position. At any point you can quit and take your losses, ending your participation in the round and eating the cards you have remaining. Since L.L.A.M.A Dice is played over multiple rounds, this is often the best strategy. The merging of intuition and risk assessment makes for a satisfying yet brief game of rolling dice.
Bang! The Dice Game
Bang! is a great social dedication party game, but at times it can overstay its welcome and leave players who had been eliminated bored. Bang! The Dice Game keeps the same theme — a Wild West sheriff must survive being attacked by outlaws with the help of their deputies — but changes the gameplay from cards to dice so you can’t hoard defensive cards to protect yourself. Instead you roll five dice up to three times, choosing to keep results that will heal you or attack enemies, or reroll hopes of getting three or more gatling gun symbols, which allow you to fire on the whole table. If dynamite shows up it can’t be rerolled and will damage you if you get three sticks, meaning you have to think carefully about pressing your luck. Spice up the gameplay with more press your luck mechanics through the Old Saloon expansion or give eliminated players the chance to come back as zombies with the Undead or Alive expansion.
Dice Forge
The faces of the dice change throughout a game of Dice Forge, where you can make offerings to the gods to earn their favor and add bigger numbers to your dice, giving you a better chance at rolling the result you need to succeed. New dice faces can reward different types of resources or even be applied to your opponents dice so you can get a reward based on what they roll. Players compete to earn the most glory, rolling dice to seek divine blessings and spending resources to achieve heroic feats, sometimes kicking other players out of game spaces in the process. Success can reward them with permanent bonuses, giving them the ability to call for reinforcements and gain resources used to improve dice or take extra actions. The Rebellion expansion adds more interactivity plus additional dice faces.
Thunder Road: Vendetta
Thunder Road: Vendetta is the modernized remake of the 80s classic Thunder Road. It’s best described as Mad Max the board game, with players rolling dice and taking turns to assign these dice to their various vehicles. Each die result determines how far along the road their car will move. Dice are also utilized for shooting, stunt work, and resolving hazards and damage. It’s a violent and chaotic game that hinges on ludicrous randomness. There is certainly a tactical element and it does reward thoughtful play, but there’s an even larger emphasis on risk-taking. Those who push the limits and indulge in the frenetic tempo will yield the biggest gains. If you ever wanted to play out the bombastic carnage of Fury Road, this board game will deliver all of it.
Dice Throne
Described as Magic: The Gathering meets Yahtzee, Dice Throne lets players face off as unique heroes with their own offensive, defensive and passive abilities including an unstoppable ultimate attack. You’ll draw and spend cards to upgrade your hero and roll dice to activate abilities as you try to defeat your opponents by reducing their health to zero. You can also inflict status effects that hurt your opponents, and gain positive ones for yourself, some of which can be spent for effects like preventing or redirecting damage. The numerous possible combinations make the tactical game highly variable whether you’re playing 1 v 1 or in a group free-for-all. If you want to play with heroes you’re already familiar with, try Marvel Dice Throne.
Grand Austria Hotel
There’s a lot to keep track of when managing a hotel in 20th century Vienna. Each face of a die indicates a different action you can take, from preparing rooms for potential guests to bringing wine or coffee to the patrons at your cafe. The more dice of a given type are rolled each round, the more effective that type of action will be. Efficiency is important, but you also have to pay attention to the individual desires of the potential guests. They have both specific food and drink requests in the cafe and can only be assigned to certain rooms to award you with points. It’s easy to want to focus just on your business, but if you don’t pay enough attention to your standing with the emperor you’d fall into disgrace and take nasty penalties. Keep track of when scoring rounds are coming up to make sure you don’t fall too far behind, but know that other players might also be making a last minute dash to gain favor.
King of Monster Island
Kaiju fans can team up and play giant monsters working together to defeat an even greater threat in this cooperative spinoff of King of Tokyo. Rolling dice Yahtzee style, you’ll seek the results you need to fight the boss and his minions, keep your creature alive, and get help from your human allies. The different bosses scale in difficulty, so you can shape your play experience from very easy games perfect for beginners or kids to challenging scenarios where you’ll need to play tactically together to succeed. Beyond rolling your own dice, the boss has their own set of dice that determine the actions they’ll take, which spill out of a volcano at the center of the board.
Pandemic: The Cure
Pandemic: The Cure offers a quick and easily portable alternative to the classic cooperative board game. It follows the same basic themes and mechanics, with players trying to stop deadly diseases from spreading around the world, but the roll of the dice will determine what you can do. You’ll need the right dice to move around the world and treat diseases, allowing you to either quarantine diseases by sending them to a treatment center or eliminate them by putting them back in the infection bag. If you roll a collect sample icon, you can also bottle dice from the treatment center and store them until you have enough to roll for the chance to find a cure. But if you’re unlucky with your dice, you’ll unleash further infections and potentially even epidemics that cause many more infection dice to appear on the board.
Sagrada
Build a beautiful stained glass window in this dice drafting game that resembles Sudoku. Players take turns drafting dice of different colors and values to add to their window, following restrictions specific to each individual’s card and the universal restriction that you can’t have adjacent dice that share a color or value. There are public objectives that show the patterns and sets all players can use to earn points, plus each player has a secret objective that will shape their gameplay. You’ll try to do the best with the dice available and avoid blocking your progress, but you also have a limited number of favor tokens based on how restrictive your board is that allow you to use tools to rearrange your patterns into a more favorable state. The game is quick to learn and beautiful to look at. You can add complexity with the Life, Passion and Glory expansions or pick up the set that lets you play with up to six people.
Too Many Bones
Play a group of adventurers trying to take down a dangerous tyrant in this highly replayable collaborative game. You’ll navigate the battle mat facing encounters where you’ll get to choose your approach to the situation and then try to beat the challenge to win training points or loot to improve your character, and progress points that get you closer to facing off against the tyrant. The game has a huge variety of dice used to attack and defend, track your character’s skills and use their special skills like throwing frag grenades or raging. The core game has four characters and seven tyrants, offering plenty of opportunity to experiment, but you can also get even more options by picking up the Undertow expansion.
For more recommendations, check out our roundups of the best three-player board games and the best games for families and adults.
