I don’t know when I first heard about “Roll Player“. Maybe I saw it once at a game store, and it looked interesting. Maybe I saw a video about it, or one of their Kickstarters.
The concept intrigued me. It’s a game about who can roll up the fantasy, D&D-ish character with the best stats that align best with their race, class, alignment and back story.
If you felt coming up with your character was the best part of tabletop RPGs, well, have I got a game for you.
I’m making this sound like a trivial, silly game — but it is not. It’s a fun game that has you competing with other players to draft the best dice, while accumulating gold with which to buy decent starting equipment and traits that might benefit you when it comes to tally the points.
Game starts with each player choosing their race, from several, and their class. The game suggested we choose them by picking a die from the dice bag, and so we did, but it’s also fine to just pick the one you want.
Each players then gets an alignment card — you will get additional stars, the currency for winning the game, for ending up with a key alignment. Back story cards give a little flavor to your character, while also providing additional ways to earn more stars by putting correctly colored dice in the indicated positions.
Play starts with each player rolling several dice — the exact number depends on the number of players — and slotting them into the character board. For my bard character, I wanted the high dice to be in dexterity and especially charisma. I didn’t get the best dice.
Once the starting dice are placed, the starting player sets out initiative cards and market cards, one more each than the number of players. They then choose that number of random dice from the dice bag, and place them in ascending order on the initiative cards.
The smart money says that choosing the highest die, when play continues, is always going to be the best move, but — the player who picks the dice on the lowest initiative card gets first crack at the cards in the marketplace.
Market cards are game changing; they often give you additional ways of earning stars, say, by having a number of dice in a certain row or column being the same color, or being your color, or making certain dice worth more than their face value. Some cards give you skills, which are additional actions you can perform on your turn which may affect your dice or your gold. Skills typically have an alignment cost — pickpocketing may tend to make you more evil, while healing would make you trend toward the good side. Alignment effects tend to limit the use of skills; of course, skill combos where one moves the alignment in one direction and the other moves it back, are incredibly powerful.
Further, after the initial set up, placing a die in a particular characteristic allows you additional actions. Adding a die to Strength lets you increase or decrease the face value of any other die. Dexterity allows you to flip a die, turning a 1 into a 6, or vice versa, and so on.
After first seeing this game at our local game store, The Portal, I forgot entirely about it. A year or two later, something reminded me about it, but of course it was gone. Monday, we spent MLK Day honoring the slain civil rights leader by exploring game stores a little further away and there it was.
I really regretted not buying the game the first time I saw it, and I regretted more not having a dice tower to roll all these dice. Well, I’m printing one now and looking forward to playing Roll Player again.
