NIGHT OF THE NINJA
Gather your mercenary powers and get ready to take out enemy ninjas… just as soon as you can work out who they are.
Night of the Ninja earns its place in the crowded social deduction genre. This is a competitive game and ultimately it’s every player for themselves, but different teams are created each round and forging alliances will help you triumph. The game splendidly dances the line between team and solo play, hurling you close to some players before throwing everything up in the air again.
Each round your House card indicates your allegiance to Lotus or Crane and the rank denotes your status within that house. The team with the highest ranked player still standing at the end of the round, wins. But brilliantly, even dead players on the winning team will get points. So sacrificing yourself for the good of the house is a valid and potentially fruitful strategy. With an odd number of players, the Ronin is added. The Ronin’s aim is simply to survive the round.
But surviving is not always simple. Every player drafts two Ninja cards, which fall into five categories – Spy, Mystic, Trickster, Blind Assassin and Shinobi. Spies and Mystics let you look at other player’s cards while Blind Assassins and Shinobis can kill other players. Tricksters are all different, providing variety and causing chaos. Ninja cards are numbered within each category and played out in a specific order, so it’s perfectly possible for a player to dramatically assassinate you just before you were planning to assassinate them.
Ninja cards may be retained instead of played, which adds nuance and aids bluffing. You may convince others that you have the power to kill in a future phase, or that you hold one of the two special cards that allow you to benefit from an attempted assassination. These reaction cards – along with the Mastermind card, which causes your house to win if you’re still standing – provide delightful twists of fate and dramatic reveals accompanied by evil laughter.
You can play Night of the Ninja without any table talk, just by quietly selecting cards, which is useful while learning the game, but is really missing the point. The richness of play emerges through unscripted sharing of information and searching for the strands of truth that run through the intricate web of lies.
A player may look at your card and then say they’re on the same team… but are they? A player may choose to announce their house to the table… this could be a move designed to provoke enemy attack, drawing attention away from higher ranked members of the house or it could be an outright lie. As with many social deduction games, you can’t rely on any information shared verbally. Suspicions are raised as soon as a single word is uttered and layers of deception erode trust. Lie too much and you may burn your bridges.
Players in the winning house each take an Honour token – worth two to four points – at random. There’s already so much hidden information in the game, which is a race to 10 points, that making the points secret as well is rather annoying. But – and it’s a big but – the game is fast which reduces the sting significantly. If you lose a game, just play another one. If you die in a round, the round will soon be over and you’ll pop back up to play again. Even when dead you can take part in discussions and influence decisions that other players make, so you don’t feel excluded.
ELLIE DIX
Plan to be lucky
An idiom that there is beauty in simplicity is proven by Dice Miner. Everything you need to know about the game is in its name. You mine – draft – custom dice that form a mountain made from dice, to then score these dice based on their attributes, to then roll the dice for the next round and draft some more dice. It is, in short, a dice game.
The thematical premise of the game, which involves the story as old as time of dwarves, tunnels and dragons, is almost immediately forgettable. It is only relevant in that you get to choose a dwarf hero character, with a unique asset, at the start of the game. The asset represents two faces of the dice, which will make it easier to score certain types of dice.
The game alternates between giving player agency in their choices and then mixing everything up by applying lots of luck. Players begin the round by drafting dice from the mountain. Although, there are certain limitations on which dice can be plucked from the mountain’s slope, there are enough options available for players to begin to strategize. Perhaps, they want to start earning victory points by picking up white, Tunnel, dice that score in sets arranged in sequential order. Or perhaps, they opt for a risky play, by taking Hazard dice, representing cave-ins and treasure-loving (and certainly not friendly) dragons. These give negative points until paired with certain green Tool dice. There are also dice that offer utility, like blue Magic dice that grant extra re-rolls. When players have mined the mountain dry, they score points based on drafted dice.
Then everything changes as players take all their dice and re-roll them. A bad roll can feel disheartening. Especially, if the re-roll broke your 15-victory point-giving sequential combination of Tunnel dice. There are ways to mitigate that, by banking some dice, to avoid re-rolling or even using the Magic dice to roll more. However, you won’t be able to save all your best dice and some hard decisions will need to be made. With some luck, you may even end up being better off than you started! 20-30m
WE SAY
10+
However, more likely, you will use your next draft phase to supplement and enhance most recently rolled dice set.
The good news is that there are several more drafting phases, so you can, hopefully, re-fill those gaps in your sequences and turn those angry Hazard dragon dice into positive points once again. Bad news is that you will be re-rolling more too and each round you will have more dice.
Ultimately, in Dice Miner, the luck of the roll will heavily influence the winner. There are choices within the game than can help you improve your chances or make better scoring decisions, but you can’t get attached to any dice outcomes, good or bad. A player that likes to be in control of all their choices and decisions throughout the game, will find Dice Miner frustrating. However, if you love getting a fistful of dice, rolling them, arranging them in combos, rinse and repeat with more dice, then you will find Dice Miner a true treasure.
ALEXANDRA SONECHKINA
❚
Dice Miner is all about the joy of the dice: the drafting, the rolling, the combos. Simple, beautiful and to the point.
WHAT’S IN THE BOX?
◗ 6 Heroes
◗ 60 Dice
◗ 1 Dice bag
◗ 1 Scoring pad
◗ 1 Mountain
TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED ZOMBIE DICE...
Some games, like Zombie Dice, are just about the joys of rolling dice. Dice Miner follows its stead, celebrating all dice-related activities through its gameplay.
A circus of horrors with big top energy that’s no great pressure.
If there’s an issue – and it’s not a massive one – it’s that none of this – the secret bidding, the bluffing, the set collection, the tableau building – feels intrinsically, or even slightly, circusy. It could just as easily – in fact far more easily – have been about buying antiques or a real estate portfolio, or rival gangsters hiring mercenaries. Theme works best when it enhances the stakes by adding a narrative, and helps explain the mechanics by making them intuitive within the logic of the world – so that, in a war game, adding walls to an area gives you a bonus to defence, for example.
Dreadful Circus has none of that. Aside from the mild chaos created by many of the cards using ‘take that’ mechanics to steal from other players’ hands or tableaus, there’s no sense of putting on a show, no audience nor spectacle. The ‘contracts’ are obviously meant to be contracts for your circus to perform in major cities, but that doesn’t really come through in the artwork or rules.
All of which is… fine? Not every game needs to perfectly evoke or simulate the thing on the front of its box. Dreadful Circus is an exciting, occasionally cutthroat game of playing the market and tricking your rivals into bad deals. There’s no catchup mechanic so if you’re repeatedly shunned there’s not much you can do, but it plays quick and there’s plenty of scope for wicked cackles and delicious howls of despair as the Seller gambles and opens the last wagon to discover a single copper coin. All of this at a price that, by modern standards, is pretty darn affordable.