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Game of Dice Mobile Review

Game Of Dice Review
Critic Score: 4 out of 5
User Rating: (10 votes, average: 2.6 out of 5)

Game of Dice is a monopoly-like dice game from Joycity for the Android and iOS. The game puts you in the shoes of players participating in the Genius League. A game where the stakes are high and victory seems to have sinister bonuses for the hapless champion.

As part of one of the many players (about 12 unlockable characters not including one-time special events) of the league, you will be participating in a 34-tile board battle against two opponents (for single player battles) or in 2v2 (for team battles) man battles. The board is setup like a squished lemniscate shaped Monopoly board with acquirable tiles based on the current events theming. The main tiles are composed of resorts while there are special tiles straight out of Monopoly like prison, income taxes, the bank/free parking, and of course the all-important Go space. Game of Dice brings in some originality though with shortcut 3 space lanes – the fortune and misery roads, offering unique boons/banes exactly as you’d imagine. Another minor nuance included is the gold/silver coin gamble square, where the player who landed on it secretly chooses a coin, and then gives/takes money from the others depending on if they guess right. Every time this square is landed on, the stakes get higher, resulting in some truly tense late game decisions.

Game of Dice Mobile Review

Gameplay is simplistic to watch but when combined with the music, becomes addictive to experience.

Gameplay

The game focuses on your character’s dice dealing capabilities. With the game feeling just like a shortened and streamlined version of Monopoly mixed with Yu-Gi-Oh (and no it’s not Dungeon Dice!). The game’s objective, just like in Monopoly, is to be the last player standing. To do that you’d need to control land tiles or steal them from others while outplaying and manipulating your foes into ruin. Unlike Monopoly where you can spend cash to upgrade houses/hotels on zones of control, Game of Dice plays it out a bit differently. To increase the power of your properties, you must either pass Go, use cards, or land on a tile you already own, and then throw more of your outer game funds into the betting pool. This last option can get a bit out of hand, with gamble addicts throwing multiple billions into the pot on a single game.

Aside from the main battle mode, the game doesn’t offer much in terms of other game features. You will be circling around in actual dice making and character development. Socialization features include a global chat and a guild system offering the bare essentials.

Game of Dice Mobile Review

Trick dice? Of course they're legal!

You and Your Dice

Game of Dice’s character pool allows you to choose from a variety of players that have their own characteristics. Your main male character choice feels like GoD’s version of Yugi from Yu-gi-oh! As he continues on screaming lines within the familiar range of Yugi’s “I believe in the heart of the cards” bit. Other characters feel just like a carbon copy of pre-existing anime characters in any ongoing or recently concluded series. But unless you get your fun out of spamming their unique taunts in every match, the only part of each character that will matter to you is their stats. Stats get nuts as you advance up the ladder ranks, making you realize that beating a veteran player is going to take more than just dumb luck.

The characters you can unlock in GoD have their own set of stats that will prove integral on how you build your card deck up. Some of the characteristics include a decrease in payment for prison break, higher percentage output on vacation spots, or even a boost in yield from the gold/silver coin mini-game. You can then enhance their base stats as you level them up by paying up gold, a much more real currency than the stuff you wager during matches.

Game of Dice Mobile Review

Your heart of the cards is legitimately quantifiable.

The other thing you’d have to consider is the creation of special dice that can bring specific boosts to your rolls. Some of the dice you can create can look really cool like the lava set, or it can be really tacky just like the PSY limited edition disco dice. Once you unlock a dice set, you can then improve their boost capabilities by collecting the fragments till you meet the quota. A truly powerful set of dice can give you a high chance of controlling your roll number within 2 standard deviations, helping guide you past game ending spaces with high certainty.

Decks Are a Thing

Aside from your character and dice sets. Game of Dice also features a skill card system that provides the necessary wrench to your opponent’s well-oiled plans. These skill cards can help increase toll collection and affect your opponent’s capabilities (like forcing him/her to use only one dice for a few turns or let’s you travel to random or specific areas within the board).

Game of Dice Mobile Review

High level players with planned out decks can be a real headache to handle.

These cards, just like your characters and dice fragments come in various rarities and strengths. The higher rarity cards provide bigger bonuses compared to their lower rarity ones and will be an integral factor in how you set your cards up as you go along.

You’ll be given three starting cards as you hand. You need to then equip six more cards that the game will randomly give you at set turns within matches. This kind of setup allows a bit of randomness even though you are trying your best to eliminate that factor in every game. It’s honestly rare a game reaches the full turn limit, so choosing to take a card in your backup deck of six means you might be eliminated or win before that card ever sees the light of day.

Snowballing

Game of Dice is truly an enjoyable game, an obvious step above the fun factor Monopoly originally brought to the board game world. However, there’s one prevailing problem the game has: snowballing. Players can, if given the ideal situation, snowball from the start of the game and basically win it uncontested. This is the problem in a game where there’s chance involved and a bit more manipulation in the deck building. Snowballing really discourages new players when they are placed against higher leveled or more financially invested ones, making your introduction to the game a steady series of brutal losses. This is partially mitigated by the Joy leagues, until you realize you can exchange your Joy for gold and items and keep your overpowered account in the lowbie leagues to continually torment their poor souls.

Game of Dice Mobile Review

Game of Dice teaches the poor life lesson that the only way to win is to gamble more.

Another problem is when the opposite happens. No matter how well you play and plan, one or two bad rolls can ruin your entire empire towards the end of the game. I’m not saying it’s impossible to win, it’s just a rollercoaster rush from start to finish whether you have the lead or are against the ropes. I’ve personally had an experience where I was down to about 100M Joy in the game with my opponent owning around 1B Joy. One bad roll and I was able to rob him of his 1B and when the turn timer ended at 0 I was the winner.

While comebacks are real awesome to see and experience. You need a different kind of tenacity to keep on playing and not lose hope in this game. But heck, you’re playing a game with dice involved so this shouldn’t even be something worth mentioning for the more experienced players. If you can’t stand the risk to gamble and lose, you’re not in the right game to begin with.

Conclusion: Great (4/5)

Overall, my experience with Game of Dice is a truly engaging one. I got hooked the minute I won my first match, blinded by the concept of quadrupling my total account Joy funds in a single battle! Just like any gambler, I got cocky and pushed my luck to quickly lose it all to more experienced players. The game is fast, fun and it does bring back memories of me actually playing monopoly with my friends. As a mobile game it’s a bit time intensive, and hard to gauge as matches can be over in a matter of minutes, or stretch out to 20+ in really engaging bouts. But if you’re looking for a mobile game you can enjoy sitting on the coach with no interruptions at home, or just need to scratch your gambling itch without losing real money, Game of Dice was made for you!

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