Dice Tower East 2026 – All The Games on Day Two
There’s only so much Disney you can have on one vacation. Actually, that’s not quite true – I could enjoy the pools, explore new restaurants, and spot those imagineering special touches for a week or two for sure.
But that can all wait until next trip. There are games to be played!
So, after two days of riding Rise of the Resistance and Rock ‘n Roller Coaster: Muppets, it was time to head back to Dice Tower East. When I got to the big open gaming room bright and early, there were only a couple of tables in use.
I grabbed one of the green “players wanted” meeples and set up Unmatched: Stars & Stripes to celebrate our nation’s 250th birthday.
Within minutes, I had three more players, one of which I had met a few days back while he was wearing his Southern Board Game Fest shirt. Matt is a gamer from Vicksburg, and he grabbed Geo Washington, while I grabbed Wyatt Earp and his sidekick Doc Holliday. Doug played John Henry for the first time, a strong character who lays track during the game and uses it for big attacks and to move quickly across the board.
During our first turns, a league and tournament player named Eric stopped by and jumped in with Rosie the Riveter. His knowledge of the Unmatched universe and the cards in each of these decks was … ahem … unmatched and we really enjoyed picking his brain.
I am sad to report that young Washington did not survive big John’s hammer, so I guess we are all speaking with a British accent now. Good job, Doug! But no matter, I’ve now gotten a chance to play all of the characters, and I’ll try to post a video soon with my thoughts on each one.
By the time we finished, the rest of the krewe was waking up. So we headed to the hot games room and checked out a few games. The Dice Tower East staff had a bunch of hot games already set up on the tables in the room. I had been wanting to demo Raas, but there was a table of gamers finishing up their last turns. So instead, we played Wingspan Pocket for a few rounds while waiting.
I think Dan at Space-Biff! has Pocket down pat, calling it a “Wingspan as a bird gliding motionless in the sky, elegant and at ease.” I only played about a third of a full game, but elegant and stream-lined is the word. It completely felt like Wingspan without all of the fuss and delays. It’s going on the to-buy list.
The table was open now, so we moved over to Raas: A Dance of Love. I’ve been wanting to play Mihir Shah‘s new game for years, but we kept missing each other at BGG Con so I never got to play the prototype. I am kind of glad now, because I got to play Raas in an absolutely gorgeous edition produced by Arcane Wonders.
While we were playing, Mihir stopped by and gave us some background. Raas is based on a folk dance in India, and players draft dice each round NOT in simultaneous fashion *wink wink* to “collect stunning dresses, give your dancers dandiya sticks, and match the style of the song to create performances that shine”.
I love the way that you draft dice. The board has little rotating spinners, and each round they rotate. The actions and dice facing you are the ones you can choose from, but you can get big bonuses if you choose an action that has dice of similar strengths connected to another action. The game is both competitive and also has a tiny bit of sharing that feels very thematic. Playing Raas was one of the highlights of the con, except for the fact that Mitchell more than doubled my score in taking the win!
After that, Doug and I were definitely itching for a good euro, so we played Phoenix New Horizon from Devir with our buddies Brian and Matt from Vicksburg. We’ve talked about Phoenix a lot on the blog (this was my fourth play in the last two weeks!) but for good reason. The first time you play Phoenix, it feels very constricting and tight. But the more you explore the board, or see how the random tile placement sets up the gameplay for that session, the more you realize that you can really get a lot more done than you think. I realize more and more that upgrading your board is important, but you really have to focus on the end-game scoring tiles and hit them hard with your actions.
Doug was two for two that morning, just barely edging out Matt at the end with some healthy bumps from his end-game scoring choices.
We needed a break from the crunchiness, so Doug and I wandered to the demo and vendor sections to the Allplay booth and found Mitchell and his friends from the Beans & Dice Podcast playing games there. We hit a bunch in succession and there were no clunkers.
First we played Wildberries, which is hitting Kickstarter this week. Imagine a quicker paying potion explosion, but instead of recipes, you are trying to fulfill (or avoid) end game scoring goals. It was a pleasant little tapas game.
The two that I enjoyed more were right next door on the demo tables. French Toast is a hilarious quick-playing party game, where one player is The Alien who can only speak in one word sentences starting with “French Toast”. Apparently, the alien visited Earth and only learned one phrase. The other players want to know what impressed the alien about Earth, and have six rounds of thirty seconds each to guess what his favorite thing was from a stack of cards. The alien can give hints on a board representing a scale of just like to not like it at all, and anytime the players get close, the alien adopts that word as the new negative. Confusing? Sure, but you get the hang of it after a couple of rounds, and this cooperative, free-flowing, word association game is a hoot. I bought a copy.
The other one was Le Chocolat, a tiny box “I split, I choose” game. Similar to Wildberries, players are trying to pull good scoring chocolate pieces from a center table while avoiding negative point producing pieces. But instead of picking marbles, players “split the candy bar” into two pieces, and if the pieces are small enough, they can choose one. Sounds easy, except your choice allows the other player to make those same choices. It’s a crunchy little thing that only takes a few minutes.
I had one last vendor to visit. I wanted to check out Dogfight 1917 from Arcane Wonders, as I saw all the promo pics that had come out of Origins. Doug called it “Unmatched In The Air”, and that’s not a bad description. Two to four players dogfight their WWI era planes (that are featured as cool little plastic airplane representations on pegs) using their own special decks. Each player has some special actions, too, coming from their player board and their pilot. It was breezy and there were highs and lows generated by the swinginess inherent with turn of the century planes flying past each other.
Doug’s streak was over, as Mitchell outlasted the both of us. I picked up my own copy with some promo cards, and of course, had to fly the plane back to the game room.
We saw another game on the demo table that I had been wanting to try as we were heading over to the gaming hall. Off With Their Heads! is the newest Alice in Wonderland game from designers JB Howell (Reavers of Midgard) and Michael Mihealsick (War of the Dragon: The Wheel of Time) and publisher Druid City Games. I liked how Doug and Mitchell described this game, as a “trick and write”. Players are trying to fill up a combolicious randowriter sheet but instead of using dice, we played a trick-taking game where the cards you play determine what and where you fill in the numbers. This was a really cool twist on the randowriter genre, and if you like those types of games, you should check this one out.
I needed to get back to WDW, and only had time for two final games for the convention. What to play? I saw Mitchell carrying Falling, the game from Capstone that I had been wanting to try, so me and Doug joined him for a quick game. Falling has an interesting theme that I did not quite get, but no matter, the importance of this game is in the play. The game feels like the usual “trade in resources for stuff” game, but then it turns that style on its head. Sure, you get a veritable cornucopia of resources each round, but the trick is to manage when and how you get them. Of course, placing buildings from your tableau onto the game board is important. But where? Of course, locking in some income for next round is critical. But what type of income? Do you want to push up the steam track to get access to better areas? Or do you want to stay close to the ground and let your buildings give you big bonuses at the end of the round?
It has an interesting “pass” mechanic I have seen used rarely. Players can pass until the next round, and as other players continue to take turns, the passing players continue to get resources and points. That makes for a tiny but significant decision — do I squeeze out another turn or two, or pass now in hopes of getting a bunch of resources for next round? But what I really enjoyed was the points mechanic. Forget scorepads or victory point tracks around the board. Instead, players scored by going around a 10 point track, and each time we completed the circuit, we grabbed a random “10 point” card off of a deck. The twist is that each card also has a resource on the back side, contributing to the cavalcade of resources we get during the game. Abundance is real!
Surprisingly, I nipped Mitchell and Doug at Falling after collecting tons of ten point cards. So, I decided to end the convention with one more deep euro, this time with Chuck and Wes playing Città-Stato, an economic euro from designer Simone Cerruti Sola. This game made my “to watch” list for Essen 2022 but I never could find a copy until seeing that ‘Dre from NOLA was selling his. Chuck agreed to teach us and away we went.
In Città-Stato, players pull action cubes from their bag, and the actions get more expensive during each round of the game. For instance, if you want to take the ‘get gold’ action, you’ll need to play a yellow cube to the market. Each successive action after that will have to increase the cost by one, meaning your second action will need two similar colored cubes, then three, etc. If that economy wasn’t hard enough to keep up, there are six different actions, but only four available to you at the game start. You have to work to get the black and white action cubes, all while trying to grab action cards that can give you quick bonuses, upgrades to your own player board, or even end game actions.
It’s a lot to think about, with even some direct interaction in some of the races for special powers, military power, and the cards in the market. But the biggest mental challenge is that your score comes from two different tracks, and if you are not carefully managing the second track (playing cards and actions to secure ‘crown’ tokens during the game), you could find yourself with a very low score despite how you well you managed the main scoring track. Luckily for me, I focused on upgrading my board and scoring lots of crowns, so I ended up tying Chuck for first place at the end (with Chuck winning the tie-breaker.) I’m glad I played it and need to get it to the table quickly while the rules are still fresh in my head.
How about some stats? I managed to play 23 unique games (for a total of 25 plays) during those two-and-a-half days of gaming. If I had to rank the top ten games I played, I would say these were my favorite experiences:
1. Tea Garden
2. Entropy
3. Raas: A Dance of Love
4. Falling
5. Dogfight 1917
6. Unmatched: Stars & Stripes
7. French Toast
8. Cities USA
9. Citta-Stato
10. Off With Their Heads!
With that, we bid adieu to Dice Tower East and headed home to Louisiana. The gap between my last attended DTE in 2022 and this year was too long; I pledge to get a rotation going of attending DTE in a yearly rotation with BGG CON, if I can.
Until next time, laissez les bon temps rouler.
— BJ from Board Game Gumbo
** Complimentary copies of some of the games listed were provided by the publisher. **