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Red Rook
United States
Tucson
Arizona
Something clever...
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Recently, one of the playtesters mentioned using custom dice for the Ghoul attacks and it got me thinking about the possibilities.
Here is how the Ghoul attacks currently work:
Players roll poker dice equal to the number of Ghouls at the location. They then evaluate the damaged caused by the roll using this guide:
The poker dice used are six sided and are all identical (9,10,J,Q,K,A). I've thought about using the eight sided poker dice to make the hand values more like card values, but each dice is different and the value rolled could be influenced on the dice you picked to roll (plus it's more complicated and may be more expensive to produce).
Making custom dice for testing would require some work, but it gives me the option to add theme and possibly change the frequency of the values (for example: if the poker dice had 2 aces on each die and left out the 9, the resulting damage would be higher and would increase the difficulty of the game). I thought about using indented dice with stickers.
For the faces of the dice, I could use Ghoul themed symbols. Unless the difficulty was increased, there would be one of each of the 6 symbols on each die:
Ghoul hand
Ghoul leg
Ghoul head
Gravestone
Crow (raven)
Blood drops
Or... Skull, Brains, Spiderweb, Spider, Bone, Bat etc.? I haven't decided on the best symbols yet. They would have to be simple, but recognizable. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Each symbol would be a different color to ease in telling them apart.
With the suggestion of using custom dice, I thought about testing with something that already exist: Zombie Dice
I'm ashamed to say that I've not yet played Zombie Dice, but it is on my list of games to buy soon. While those dice match the theme, the symbol distribution presents a problem for the current setup.
In Zombie Dice, there are 3 different colored dice, all with different distributions.
6 Green dice: 4 brain, 1 run, 1 shotgun
4 Yellow dice: 2 brain, 2 run, 2 shotgun
3 Red dice: 1 brain, 2 run, 3 shotgun
This distribution wouldn't work well for pair, 2 pair, 3 pair, straight etc., but there may be another way to use them. The tricky part would be to use rules that result in about the same damage that is currently applied.
Purchasing a separate set of Zombie Dice for each playtesting set would be cost prohibitive, but if they fit into the game well, I wonder if Steve Jackson Games might be interested in incorporating the idea into a joint publication. How cool would that be!
Back to reality... there are 13 dice in a Zombie Dice set which are far more that Aces & Eights: Dead Man's Hand (A8) would need. The color coding of green, yellow, and red (with green being easier) is from the zombies perspective. This is the reverse of A8 because the players are fighting the Ghouls/Zombies.
I could just stick with the green dice and use the 4 brain, 1 run, and 1 shot distribution. Players could roll the number of dice equal to the number of Ghouls (including encounters with a single Ghoul, which is different from how it is now... currently the dice are only rolled if there are 2 or more Ghouls because you can't get a pair with a single die). Any brain symbols would be a hit, run symbols would be nothing (safely evading the initial attack) and shotgun blasts could be used to add value to the player's card hand. This means that players could potentially go after locations that have overwhelming odds and hope for a few shotgun symbols in their dice roll.
In my head, this has potential, but I'd need to test it of course.
Any suggestions? Does anyone see game-breaking flaws in this idea?
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