Pyrite Prospecting: Rolled West Board Game Review

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Hm. I have the same problem with dice games, in that I'm not really enthusiastic about THAT much randomness in things I play. With games that require literal handfuls of dice (like most GW offerings), there are many ways to mitigate that randomness. You just have to time your attacks properly and focus your efforts in a couple specific sectors/units to make things really pay off. As a case example of their (very) long-term design processes, every time they offered up something genuinely random for Chaos, everyone avoided it because no one wanted to risk their whole game on a single roll of the dice.

I think the "banking" system has promise, but that sounds very slow for a smaller game. I really like the way Tiny Epic Galaxies attempts to ameliorate the issue of being dependent on dice. First off, you get one free reroll of any/all dice each turn. Second, you can spend Energy to do more rerolls, as many as you have resources for. Third, you can spend two of your dice to get one result with the Converter. And last, and more importantly, you can spend the other resource, Culture, to duplicate your opponents' die rolls and make progress on your own tasks. That's a lot of making up for poor luck on six-sided dice. Does Rolled West have anything like that other than "banking" for rolls on TWELVE-sided dice? If not, I'd shy away instantly.

Unfortunately, it doesn't have anything other than "banking." And what is bizarre is that you can have what would be consider in most games as a great roll (Say, four of a kind of Wood) and not be able to Really exploit it at all. You would set one aside for the terrain, spend two on building both a tent and a settlement on the Wood settlement track and, well, bank the last one because you really have nothing else you can do with it unless you can combine it with something you have already banked to buy a Boom Town. The banking system is just not enough to mitigate the luck of the dice. And, like you pointed out, other games that thrive on dice like TEG have found a fantastic sweet spot for mitigation while still letting you roll the bones.

Edit: And yes, while the dice are 12 sided, there are only 4 unique faces. Maybe they are just more pleasing than 4 or 8 sided alternatives.

Thought about that after I posted. I'm not enough of a statistician to know how much odds are affected by a 1 in 4 of 12 possibilities, rather than a 1 in 4 of 4. It's certainly more digitally pleasing to avoid the triangular dice, as d12s feel like they're actually rolling, rather than just landing on whatever side. Root took advantage of that, even though those dice are only three possibilities.