Week 10 (6th - 12th January 2014): D-Day Dice - Buffing My Bayonet

Just a quick one (ooh-err) this week, as I've been busy again, as well as having been struck down by some variant of the dreaded Winter illness that is going down (hacking cough, nausea, hairs growing on the palms of my hands) - no doubt brought on by too much ludic self-abuse. Any way, this week's  entry (ooh-err) is D-Day Dice, a dice-rolling/push your luck/resource manangement offering published by Valley Games.

The premise of the D-Day Dice is that you are leading a platoon of Allied troops, sector by sector, up one of the beaches during D-Day (Omaha, Utah, Sword, Juno, etc.). There are eight game boards, each representing one of the beaches (and of varying difficulty) upon which the game is played. Your platoon is represented by a dice with various symbols on (mainly chevrons), which are used to indicate how long you can remain in a sector (usually a maximum of three turns). Each turn, you roll a set of six dice, also bearing various symbols which represents resources (such as soldiers and courage),  or difficulties (a skull, which cancels out one other of your dice so you cannot claim those resources) to aid or hinder you until you reach the objective at the end of the beach. In order to mover from sector to sector, you need to acquire enough points of courage to advance (the number required is marked on the board). You also have to engage in combat in each sector, which will reduce the number of soldiers you have acquired. Other symbols marked on each sector cause various effects (including minefields which cause randomly determined losses; or machinegune nests, which randomly increase the combat value of the sector - also causing you to lose more troops).

Game in progress, towards the end of play

To win the game, you need to enter the bunker at the end of the beach, and survive combat in that sector. You lose if you have no more troops left, or you are in a position where you must move but are unable to. I played two games, each taking about twenty minutes, using the training battle map. The first game using only the very basic rules I won without much trouble. The second, in which I used all of the rules, proved more difficult and I ended up losing due to ll of my troops being wiped out.

In brief, the game is very quick, easy to learn, and does look quite nice (fairly high production values, and all of the special dice are of good quality). The game works co-operative or solitaire, and is a nice filler if you have twenty minutes to spare and fancy a bit of a dice fest. Having said that, D-Day Dice didn't quite work for me - it just didn't really engage me, although it seems to have quite a following on boardgamegeek. Quite likely, this one will end up on my ebay pile. Not that it is a bad game, just not for me. Bearing that in mind, I can see the appeal of this, so on the Gaming Self-Abuse Scale (TM), this scores 7/10.