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Falling off the Edge of the World

Here is a simple dice game for y’all.

Everyone needs four pawns or markers, and then you need three dice, and then make a board that has ten spaces numbered four through thirteen, plus a little starting area before the “4” space where everyone’s pawns start out, and also make sure that the “13” space is right next to the edge of the board.

This is a roll-and-move game of the misère variety since you lose when you move your last piece off the board, and you win by hanging on the longest.

When it’s your turn, roll all three dice, then you can have one reroll where you can reroll all or any of the dice, one time. For example, if you roll 1, 2 and 4, maybe you decide to reroll the 4, or maybe you decide to reroll the 1 and the 4, or you decide to keep them all. You reroll all the dice at the same time. So it’s sort of like Yahtzee in that regard, except you only get one reroll, not two. The more immediate inspiration for this dice system is the game “Lost Cities On a Treasure Hunt” by Knizia.

Then you can add any or all of the dice together, ignoring up to two of the dice (you can’t roll zero). So if you have rolled 1, 2, and 4, that can become:

Then you can move any one of your pawns to the number you rolled. You don’t move “that many steps”, you move to that number. And you need to move from a lower-numbered space (or from the “starting area”).

Any sum fourteen or higher (there are three dice, so fourteen through eighteen) means moving the pawn “off the edge of the world” and out of the game. You lose the game if you’re the first to move all four your pawns off (and everyone else wins. They can keep playing if they wanna know who wins more, but, that’ll be boring for the person who fell off).

You’ve got to move, so if your dice can combine in a way that lets you move one of your pawns forward, you have to. For example, if all your pawns are on “8” or higher and you roll 4 4 4? You’ve got to move one of them to the “12” space.

If your dice combine so that you can’t move any pawn? For example, if all your pawns are on “8” or higher and you roll 1 2 3, which can’t combine to anything higher than six? Ouch. This is called “a storm rolling in”. You need to make two new turns in a row. And this punishment is recursive: if a storm rolls in on any of your replacement turns, you need to take two additional turns, and so on. So keeping low numbers is a risk!

Pawns can coexist peacefully on the same space. It’s a race, not a wrestling match. That said, I’m sure you can cook up variants if you want turn landing on other people’s spaces into some sorta interaction.