Dice Throne is a tabletop game that utilizes both dice and cards to pit heroes against each other in fast-paced turn-based combat, with additional options to face off in teams or have everyone band together in a cooperative adventure. It’s a remarkably quick (and fun!) game to set up and play, making it an ideal choice for folks who don’t have hours to devote each week to D&D, Pathfinder, or any system that similarly lends itself to a long-form adventure.
The Dice Throne team is set to soon release its long-awaited X-Men expansion, injecting more Marvel heroes to fight alongside Dice Throne’s largely original cast of characters. This is the second expansion to add licensed characters to the game–Dice Throne added a bunch of non-mutant Marvel characters like Thor and Black Panther to its roster in a previous add-on. Speaking to Dice Throne co-creator and lead game designer Nate Chatellier and CEO Casey Sershon, I asked how this “Magic: The Gathering meets Yahtzee” game approached adding licensed characters to a game and whether more IPs are being considered.
“When we started Dice Throne, I created this five-year plan,” Chatellier told me. “I love long-term planning, and the plan back then was season one, season two, a solo and co-op mode–which ended up being Dice Throne Adventures–and then a Marvel edition. I thought it was a five-year plan, it took six years to do it, but we checked all the boxes, which I’m still very proud of. When we hit that Marvel edition, that was the end of the road map. It was like, ‘Okay, where do we go from here and how do we feel about working with IP?'”
“Long-term, we’ll continue to pursue both,” Sershon said. “We will be continuing to pursue original IP and licensed IP… Original IP is super cool. It’s an open sandbox, but then that’s also one of the fun things with working with licensed IP is it steers your vision [and] puts some constraints on it. It lets us narrow in on what is going to make this character feel right, and that opens our minds, all the developers, to [figuring out] what’s this new mechanic we can add in to make it feel like [the fantasy of] this character.”
“We don’t want to be an IP company, like that’s all that we do, but we don’t want to be a company that shies away from IP that we love, that we’re passionate about that fits our system,” Chatellier added. “We’re not a company that’s trying to just cash grab. We have to feel like we love this, we can do it justice, and it can become part of it. The more we talked about that, then it felt like adding X-Men to this world just made a lot of sense.”
In Dice Throne, you play as your chosen character, rolling six-sided dice on your turn to try and get specific patterns that allow you to use a hero’s various abilities. You can also play cards to better your odds, improve certain skills, or make things worse for opposing players. The Pyromancer is a fairly approachable hero who deals with opponents with explosive fireballs and high-damage flames, for example, while the somewhat complex Huntress commands a sabretooth tiger named Nyra to attack and defend for her, forcing a player to find ways to maintain that bond to boost the hero’s capabilities.
“The goal is quick set up, quick play, and longevity,” Chatellier said. “We joke [and] say, ‘Dice Throne is the game that you’ll actually play,’ [but it’s only] sort of a joke. [Jordan, you] talked about having 20 games that are coming out [that look interesting], and Dice Throne [stays competitive by] only taking 30 seconds to set up and 30 minutes to play a game, and once you read the short core rules of the game, you don’t have to read another 20-page rule book. You already know how to play the game, you just learn new heroes.”
Though initially designed as a dueling game, Dice Throne can be played with a more story-driven structure with one-shot Missions and longer Adventures. “If you like these long campaign-style games, Adventures is great and falls along that audience. Missions plays very similar to Adventures but it’s not the long multi-night, multi-week campaign style. It’s a single play through one night,” Sershon said.
“With Adventures, I made a game for me,” Chatellier said. “I love the long [story.] I do a lot of legacy games. I love the long, drawn-out thing. My wife and I do regular double dates where we play legacy games. I wanted that. The problem that I realized over time is not everybody has a long-term gaming group and if they do, maybe not everybody wants that game to be the game that their gaming group plays. [Adventures] is more complex than classic Dice Throne, so even some people who like normal Dice Throne, felt like [it] is a little too complex. There were some things that were strengths to me as a game choice, but were weaknesses to others. With Missions, we swung the pendulum the other direction.”
New Marvel-focused Missions that see you fighting against the likes of Mysterio, Mystique, Mister Sinister, and Hela are coming but the bigger update (or at least, the one I’m more excited for) is the new heroes. The X-Men expansion adds eight playable characters: Wolverine, Storm, Cyclops, Rogue, Gambit, Psylocke, Iceman, and Jean Grey. “We have a massive spreadsheet with all of the Marvel heroes [and] all of the X-Men heroes, and we evaluated them on tons of different metrics to try to decide which heroes we would choose in our game,” Chatellier said. “It’s not an easy decision, frankly. There are many metrics: how much do we love the hero, how popular is the hero in general, and then hero intrigue.”
Chatellier described hero intrigue as how distinct a hero’s abilities could be when translated into the mechanics of Dice Throne. With nearly 40 characters released or announced, the Dice Throne team needed to make sure they didn’t add X-Men who would clash with an established hero’s playstyle or any other X-Men. That’s why only Miles Morales was added in the previous Marvel expansion and not Miles and Peter Parker, why Logan’s Wolverine was included but not X-23, and why Jean Grey’s addition meant characters like Professor Xavior and Emma Frost were omitted. Emma Frost made the cut as an NPC that players can encounter during Missions, though.
“We have a lot of [women in the community] as well, including my daughters, and so I did want some powerful [women] in the game, it was important to us,” Chatellier said. “We knew that we were going to do Dice Throne Missions, so we separated the villains so that they could be reserved as villains in Missions rather than playable heroes. A lot of people have asked, ‘Why can’t we play [as] some of the villains?’ That was why, because we wanted Missions to be a thing. That was it.”
“And Nate’s just speaking to the character selection and the mechanic design,” Sershon added, referring back to the process of who was included in the X-Men expansion and the back-and-forth of designing each hero. “There’s the whole visual design too that the art team had to go through about what era of costume they use–do we make original [designs] versus adhering to what they classically look like. There was just a lot of involvement from Marvel on that and a lot of collaboration between all the teams. In the end, it was a great result though. We’re very happy with it.”
With this X-Men expansion and the recently Kickstarted Outcasts expansion, Dice Throne’s roster of playable heroes has nearly reached 40. And apparently, that’s not enough. “If we hit a point where we say it’s enough, it’s because we are done coming up with new, refreshed content and frankly, we are nowhere near that,” Chatellier said. “We have, I don’t know, 30 plus heroes in the hopper [that are] in various stages of development right now already. We have a great community on Facebook and Discord and other places where they create their own heroes, and it’s clear our fanbase is nowhere near feeling like this is enough heroes. They want more and more, and more. We can’t keep up, really.”
Previously the CEO, Chatellier passed the role to Sershon earlier this year to focus on developing various digital projects, even exploring the possibility of a digital version Dice Throne for players who want to play together virtually. It’s still not a foregone conclusion as to whether they’ll take the project on (I’m hopeful since I play most tabletop games with friends over Discord), but in the meantime, Chatellier is still the lead on game design of the physical tabletop game.
“We’re eight years in [and our 10-year anniversary] feels a lot closer to us than you might think,” Sershon said. “We’re already having the conversations about what it means and what our plans are–with the timelines of tabletop development, two years out is not that far.”
You can grab Dice Throne Season 1 or Dice Throne Season 2 for $99 each, Dice Throne Adventures for $80, and Dice Throne Marvel for $109. Preorders for Dice Throne Marvel X-Men and Dice Throne Marvel Adventures are both open–the former is $109 while the latter is $70. Grabbing Season 1, Season 2, Marvel, or Marvel X-Men is all you need to get started; you don’t need to own Season 1 to play the subsequent collections.
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