I first saw David desJardin's "Dice chess" on r.g.b, I think. For those who haven't heard of it, it has the following rules.
- Play a game of chess
- Both players roll a die, the winner of the chess game gets to add +1 to his roll.
- Hi roller wins.
This came to mind when I was playing
Hanging Gardens again (after playing it once a year ago). Hanging Gardens has the clever spatial building mechanic to build towers, but then the reward for building a tower is a tile draw and tiles score via set collection. Sometimes a cheap tower gets you a great tile, sometimes a great tower gets you nothing. Pretty random. You also have a card draft and sometimes the last player will always get an OK tile, and sometimes the first player gets nothing good.
All the skill gives you a bonus on your die roll. To be fair to Hanging Gardens, skill probably gives you +2.
Coupled with some cards that practically guarantee a tile versus terrible cards that can barely be played, I really should hate this game instead of being lukewarm towards it.
Now, I can understand the appeal of the luck ... people with poor spatial grasps have trouble with this game, and would get pummelled if you just scored some formulae for how big each section you built was. Still, it feels hacked on. I don't see how you can categorize a game as dice chess and like it.
