Um Krone und Kragen is Yahtzee with special powers.

Still there?

Each turn you get dice. Start with three of them. Throw them. With each throw, you must reserve one or more dice. Repeat until you can't throw again. Then claim one of the rewards on offer, based on your roll (X of a kind, all even, all odd, straights, full houses, large sums, etc). These rewards then allow you to manipulate subsequent rolls in future turns in various ways: roll more dice, change the values of dice, move pips amongst them, etc. Some roles are plentiful (the Farmer, who requires a pair and gives you an extra die), while some are scarce (the Astronomer, who allows you to change a die to anything you want). First person to get a seven of a kind triggers the endgame, with each player then using the powers they've accumulated to that point to try to get the best roll (most-of-a-kind).

I would normally try to offer you some bit of analysis here, but I imagine the above description should tell you whether you'll like it or not. I'll just offer a couple tidbits. #1: Yahtzee is underrated (this is not saying a lot, given the contempt it is widely held in by hobby gamers, but there is definitely a somewhat interesting game there, albeit perhaps not a highly replayable one). #2: I know you'll have trouble believing this, but there is a fair amount of luck in Um Krone und Kragen. The second time I played, I played terribly, making poor choices throughout the game and getting a mediocre range of powers. In the endgame, though, my dice all of a sudden got outrageously hot, and I racked up 8 5's to win over my much more competant fellow-players. Don't play this game if that sort of result is going to bug you. If you found the luck of the risks in Beowulf unduly frustrating, for example. But you hardly need me to tell you that.

My only real criticism of Um Krone und Kragen is the downtime. With all the rolling, re-rolling, and parsing out the large numbers of rewards available, it can be a while between turns, especially with larger numbers of players, and there is absolutely nothing to do while you're waiting except to kibbitz (Can't Stop's legendary taunting dynamic isn't really present here, which is a notable loss). Also, there is an odd start-player rotation rule, which has play going clockwise but the start-player rotating counter-clockwise, resulting in double-turns and sligtly greater gaps. I assume this was an attempt to compensate for the first-player advantage, but it's awkward, and given the luck in the game I'm not sure it's worth it. The downtime with 4 was manageable, but just, and it discouraged me from trying the game with 5 (the max). The first couple games will see more downtime as players wrestle with the available rewards, but will also be more amenable to kibbitzing as players help each other work out the options.

At the end of the day, I found the process of playing Um Krone und Kragen to be pretty fun and so the downtime didn't bother me unduly. It's not a game you can take too seriously, but for a dice game, there are a lot of intesting choices, and the dice feed those choices, making the randomess serve a useful game purpose. The tactics of the interacting powers and when to use them are far from trivial – you are likely to make a lot of mistakes and overlook opportunities your first couple games. You have to balance what powers you'd like to try to acquire with what the dice are telling you to go for and what you might need that is in short supply. And the game is deceptively short, only 45 minutes or so even for early plays. I think there is enough fun factor in playing Um Krone und Kragen, and enough feeling of control, to make the occasional upset due to outrageous bad or good luck palatable.

There is a category of games that I feel are popular in large part due to their comfort level, their underlying familiarity, their similarity in feel to classic games with which we are all familiar, even if that similarity is somewhat remote. This includes games like Ticket to Ride (Rummy) and Carcassonne (Dominoes or puzzles). Um Krone und Kragen certainly has the potential to do something similar for category dice games (admittedly a smaller slice of people). It's somewhat more complicated than Ticket or Carcassonne I think due to the array of powers and roll categories, but it has that same underlying familiarity, with a tactical richness that will appeal to hobbyists. And rolling dice is fun.

This is a slightly updated version of a review that originally appeared on my blog: http://homepage.mac.com/c_farrell/iblog/

Well, yes and no. You are correct that someone has to actually take the King to trigger the endgame. But I can't come up with a situation in which someone would roll 7-of-a-kind and their best move would not be to take the King. The vast, overwhelming majority of the time, the first player to roll 7-of-a-kind takes the King and triggers the endgame.

Easy.

You're the last player in the round. Which means, you'll also be the first player NEXT round. If you get a lucky run and happen to get 7x, well it might make more sense to take the 6x card (+2 dice) and then go for the 7x on your next turn (i.e., right away), whereby you are much more likely to get it AND you are then much mroe likely to KEEP IT in the end-game roll off.