Dice Kingdoms

Dice Kingdoms is a dice-driven kingdom-building game: players roll, choose results, and turn those rolls into towns, upgrades, and score engines. By our assessment, its best feature is how cleanly it turns a handful of dice into planning, so every turn has a small puzzle in it. The downside is the usual one for this family of games: luck remains in the room, and a bad roll can narrow your options more than you would like. In practice it has the brisk feel of a light strategy game, with enough structure to think about but not so much bookkeeping that it slows down. It sits neatly beside other roll-and-write or dice management games, and the appeal comes from making the most of what the dice hand over.