New Game Round-up: A Trio of Space Cadets, Desperados Moves from Darts to Dice & Friese's Future Funken

When I had a real job, every lunchtime with my buddies we'd drink coffee and organize small competitions amongst ourselves. For years we played foosball, but the table was removed — not profitable enough, too much space occupied — and an electronic dart game installed. At first, the game left me cold as I saw it as a game of pure skill, one in which I didn't feel competent enough to compete. It was more like a test, which was not fun.

Then I discovered the rules for Cricket! You use only the 20-19-18-17-16-15 and central sectors. Three hits in an area closes it for you, and once closed if you hit it again, every opponent who has this area "open" takes penalty points. Because the useful areas are scattered on the dartboard, you can adopt an offbeat strategy to play against those more skilled, trying to load the areas strongest to you.

Then we removed the darts as I thought it would be cool to take the same principle of play and adapt it to a game, and that's how the first prototype was born. Simple. I wanted to replace the pure skill of the game with luck — although given how I play darts, it works out the same — so the darts were replaced with dice. The relevant sectors of the dartboard became the 2-3-4-5-6 faces of the die, with the last face being a "dart" face, a strike. Three darts = three dice rolls on a turn. A variety of fun cards would allow for offbeat strategies and give you choices on which dice to keep or reject and voilà.