Dave Reviews: Dice Gardens

Alhambra: The Dice Game

Alhambra, the base game, is mainly about laying tiles to create a city, keeping one eye towards how it's walled (gotta keep out those pesky bandits) and the other towards the types of tiles, both which you have and which your opponents have. Everything revolves around tiles and the types of money you collect and use to buy those tiles.

Then we have the dice game, which begs the question: If it has no tiles and it has no money, is the game really Alhambra?

So, how does Alhambra with dice work? To its credit, it isn't a 100% different game with the Alhambra label to earn more sales. The colors you're chasing and scoring system are the same—three rounds of scoring with increasing points available each round, and the ability for more players to score some number of points each round. Alhambra players will immediately recognize those aspects. The change, of course, is how you get in position to score those points.

Dice are rolled in a Yahtzee style—roll everything, then choose what you want to reroll, for up to three rolls. You have eight dice, and since Alhambra has six types of buildings, that lines up nicely with using regular dice for this game. Your goal is not just to get as many of one type as you can, but if possible, to do it in as few rolls as you can.

This is where there's a little more strategy than it might first appear. Each combination of dice outcomes and total rolls is represented one time for each color. That is to say, if you land five purple towers on three rolls and put your marker there, no one else can take the 5-3 spot on purple. If someone else gets five towers on three rolls later in the round, they're automatically bumped back to 4-1 (four towers on one roll). If someone is already there, they get bumped back again, and so on.

Dice math being what it is, outcomes in the middle of the range are most common, leading to a different type of risk-reward consideration than dice games tend to have. It becomes a little more like poker—you can know the odds of your next roll, but what will your opponents do? Can you put them in a tough situation? Will they be prone to taking more risks, ones which might short-circuit their chances of winning?

Most of the harder decisions come earlier in the round, before many markers are on the board. One example someone is likely to see is getting five of a building in two rolls. To do that beats the odds, and getting five in one roll is very difficult, so 5-2 is a safe spot to be (especially if no one's ahead of it already). Getting a sixth one is a 50/50 proposition with the three remaining dice, and if you fail, you go to 5-3, which gives someone else a much better chance of getting ahead of you than they would have had otherwise. But getting to six is also quite difficult, and a 50/50 chance of making it is is almost as good as it gets.

Likewise if you land four on the first roll—it's not extremely hard to beat five, but 4-1 might be a safe second place. If you don't need to move as far up the track for that color as possible—if you're already well in front, or can't catch the next person, or just need to play a spoiler—do you stay with that and hope for the best? This especially happens if someone is already in the 5-3 spot, since if you take 4-1, you're extra-protected, but still, five on two rolls is hardly impossible...

This really is the whole game, so if you don't like dice math, you may find the depth of strategy lacking. Your humble reviewer is a fiend for games of not-entirely-chance, so this is admittedly in my wheelhouse. It's not wildly groundbreaking or made with a special kind of genius. But if you see "Alhambra: The Dice Game" on the shelf, and you're a cynical board game veteran, you may well think, eh, just another money grab, when it is in fact a reasonably good game. If you like dice and/or you have more casual friends who might enjoy the Alhambra aesthetic but not the entire kit of regular Alhambra, it's worth a go.

Score: Five winning colors out of six.