Super Dice Battle review

I really like fighting games, but I am absolutely terrible at them (except for Soul Calibur II, my beloved). That’s why I’m a big fan of board games that emulate them—they let me make up for my inability to actually memorize/execute combos. Super Dice Battle claims to offer just that, with super-light and fast gameplay with turnless dice rolling. Seems promising, right? Unfortunately, Super Dice Battle just misses the mark in enough spots that the result isn’t worth keeping on my shelf.

Rules & Components

The rules start fine, as the game is mechanically very simple—players roll dice to try and complete combos to attack each other—but there are a lot of little clarifications that the rulebook lacks, which lead to inevitable questions. For example, the rules never state when a player is allowed to use their special combo to gain their Character Token. (Does it stop the game like an offensive combo? Can you gain it after someone else has started resolving an offensive combo?) Also, rules-as-written, you can only ever commit a die to the leftmost requirement on each combo, preventing you from ever actually fulfilling the other requirements and thus actually activating anything. Aside from that technicality, the game is playable, but you’ll have to deal with things like it as you’re learning.

The components are actually pretty nice. The character boards are all nice and sturdy, with plainly legible iconography (once you learn it). The custom dice are very easy to read and chunky enough that they’re fun to roll. The character designs are also pretty interesting. My favorite is easily Capt. Bertha Burnwater, the shark piloting a flamethrower-weilding mech-suit (not an anthropomorphic shark, mind you, just an actual shark). I just wish that they were featured in a better game.

Gameplay

Super Dice Battle has players simultaneously rolling dice and committing one of the results to their combo board. While there are two different “modes” for this, the slow mode is just painfully tedious and unfun, as everyone rolls once and waits for the other players to commit their result before rolling again. The fast mode, where each player can individually reroll as soon as they’re ready, is definitely the intended way to play, and I would recommend ignoring the slow mode entirely. There are also two “formats” which are really just endgame triggers. You can play either “stock”, where each player has a set amount of lives, or “victory points”, where KO’ing a player gives you a point, and first to three points wins. In “victory points”, only the final attack on a player counts, so all attacks that don’t KO a player are actually worthless. There are a lot of other, better ways to handle a point-based brawl, so I’m not sure why this uses the most flawed version. So, similar to the “option” of modes, I would just stick with “stock” and ignore the points.

While the options for setting up the game aren’t as versatile as they appear and the rulebook misses the mark, the gameplay is luckily… fine? For a game all about combos, you as a player don’t actually get to do any. Once you’ve filled a set of requirements on your board (and optionally the bonus requirements to improve your ability), you simply resolve whatever it says (pausing the game to do so if it’s an attack) before clearing those dice and going right back into it. The game doesn’t change at all over the course of its short playtime, aside from each character’s current health. With the exception of one character’s special Token, there’s no way to adjust your die results besides just rerolling them. Which seems fine, until you’re stuck rolling over and over again because the dice refuse to land on the one symbol out of eight that you need to meet the last requirement. And when you finally get the result that you need, you deal a bit of damage and get the opponent somewhat closer to losing a stock. Unless you roll poorly on the damage die, and your attack barely tickles them. The game just ends up feeling somewhat tedious after a certain point.

The game acts like it wants to give players meaningful decisions with the different attack effects and the unique special tokens, but then leaves everything up to the dice, so it feels more like a strategy-less party game. They turned button-mashing in a fighting game into an entire standalone board game, and it’s about as dull.

While I am ragging on the game quite a bit, I wouldn’t say that it’s entirely bad. There are some interesting ideas here that could have made something solid. But there are much better options available for the niche you want this game to fill. Want a light version of a fighting game? Try Pocket Paragons, which actually leaves some decisions to the players. Want more of a party brawler? Go for Dungeon Mayhem or Red Dragon Inn for weird and wild shenanigans, while still feeling like you make your own choices.