The Tao of Gaming

I don't find it nearly as random as all that, given that you pick the tile you want from up to 6 possibilities - the only random tiles you get are the bonuses from making regions of 6+ squares, and you won't get many of them. I often decline to score a region in order to choose from more and different tiles the following turn.

I thought dice chess was meant to prove the point that a game could have largely random outcomes yet still be deeply strategic and interesting. That is, dice chess is exactly as deep as chess, it's just that the final outcome is nearly random. If you don't care much about the outcome (of any one particular game), then I think you should like dice chess about as much as you like chess (and by extension, any game with strategic decisions, regardless of the level of luck involved in the final outcome). Fluxx, for example, is very largely random, yet there are in fact many non-trivial decisions you can make that can improve your odds by a very small amount; if you play enough games, the better player will have a better winning percentage... eventually. (It's also true that the decisions are mostly tactical rather than strategic, but that's a whole different axis.)

Even though I remember David introducing the concept of Dice Chess, I don't recall what point he was trying to make with it. But despite what you both say, it's not a game I want to play. As Knizia said, the point of a game is to win, even if your enjoyment of the game doesn't depend on your winning. If I get the feeling that the actual outcome has little to do with these interesting decisions in the game, then I stop finding them interesting. Instead, I'll focus on the things that do increase the chances of my winning and, if that's a random process, I'll avoid the game altogether. Mind you, it isn't that winning is that important to me. It's that the designer has set a goal for me and the point of a game is to achieve that goal; it's what gives the playing of the game meaning. You could say, just ignore the random part, but in this case, what you'd then have is regular Chess, which is a game I WILL play, so the end result is the same (me avoiding Dice Chess).

Let me put it this way. Suppose the main part of Killer Bunnies had more interesting gameplay than the current game does (and I've been told it does have its interesting features), but the result was still determined by the same maddening random card draw. Would you want to play it? Maybe you would, but I would stay far, far away.