SR has an answer to the glut of collectible trading card games that clutter the field -- collectible dice. The Dragon Dice starter box comes with a mixture of dice that are units from four races: Goblins, Dwarves, Coral Elves and Lava Elves. Players build armies out of any combination of races and vie for control of eight-sided terrain dice. Each race's dice are a mixture of two colors which are based on elemental magic: gold for Earth, blue for Air, red for Fire and green for Water, with the addition of black for Death. Goblin dice, for instance, are gold and black, indicating they specialize in Earth and Death magics.

The dice are engraved with five basic action icons: maneuver, missile, melee, magic and save. A given die will have a combination of these icons, with varying numbers of each on a face. The races have different proportions of icons, representing how good they are at the various fields. Basic play involves choosing one of the five actions, rolling the dice and counting how many icons of that type you rolled. During attacks, defenders roll for saves, with damage resulting from any unblocked hits. Rolling for magic allows you to buy and cast spells, and every color can summon dragons, formidable 12-sided dice that wreak havoc on everyone.

This is a very well-thought-out game and a lot of fun. The basic concepts are easy to learn, and play is quick. One problem is that each type of die (there are 15 per race) is identified by a face on one of its sides. For four races that means there are 60 different little faces carved in the dice, and they are hard to tell apart. Luckily you only need to know what they are when building an army -- in play the faces are simply counted as wild cards, adding one to whatever action you're attempting.

Overall Dragon Dice is reminiscent of miniatures wargaming, but movement and terrain are so simple -- and the game moves so quickly -- that it feels more like playing out a battle from a fantasy novel. The game is great fun straight out of the box, although expansion sets (known as kicker packs in TSR parlance) will add some welcome variety to the basic set.

Dragon Dice will swallow my pocket money for months to come.
-- Brooks

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