Designer Diary: Dice Miner

By Joshua DeBonis and Nikola Risteski

We're a team of designers who met through a playtesting group in NYC that Josh organized and Niko would often host. We started hanging out after work, and over beers and half-priced sushi, we realized that we had very different perspectives and experiences with game design, which made us a really good team.

Our first collaboration together was a game called Isle of Monsters, published in 2017. It included a dice-drafting mechanism that we eventually removed to simplify and focus that game — but we knew the removed mechanism was very interesting on its own, so we decided to use it as the basis of our second adventure together, now known as Dice Miner.

The Mountain

Early iterations of Dice Miner were immediately playable and fairly fun. The core of the game was more or less the same as it is now, which is that players take turns drafting one die at a time.

However, instead of the dice being on a mountain, the dice were arranged in a pyramid flat on the table. This made any restrictions about which dice you could pick feel arbitrary, in addition to making the set-up awkward and the gameplay prone to accidental cheating.

We were stuck until someone suggested letting gravity do most of the work! We liked this idea and realized that by elevating one end of the "board" and turning the dice 45º, the set-up would be a breeze, the dice would literally fall into place, and it would be obvious which dice were legal to draft and which were not. This marked a major milestone in Dice Miner's development.

We created a series of prototype mountains, first out of cardboard, then laser-cut from acrylic, and eventually 3D printed. We immediately noticed that the game had a much stronger table presence and created a spectacle while playtesting. Passers-by would often stop to check out the game. That gave us a lot of confidence that the game had serious potential.

Beer

We knew the game needed a way to let players shift up the rhythm a little bit, as well as a way to have a little bit more interaction between players, so we added a beer symbol to each die, which allows you to draft two dice at a time instead of one by saying "cheers" and rolling that die to another player. This accomplished both our goals as well as creating a common thread across all the dice.

Why beer? We wanted something that didn't feel completely out of character with the fantasy theme, but that also was a little bit surprising and unusual. Plus we both love beer, and we're generally sharing some microbrews while playtesting together. A couple of early working titles were actually "Beer & Magic" and "Rollin' Bräu".

Atlas Games

Several publishers liked Dice Miner as a game, but the production of the mountain was a real challenge. We ultimately signed with Atlas Games, which had the experience and confidence that they could publish the game properly, and obviously they did a great job pulling it off.

We had an amazing experience working with them and in particular our producer and developer, Jeff Tidball. They extensively playtested the game, gave us incredibly useful feedback and game design decisions, and often challenged us to come up with creative solutions to issues they identified, yet trusted us in the few situations where we pushed back.

Hazards, Magic, and Characters

Two balance issues that they brought to us come to mind. The first was that experienced players could create huge multiplicative combos by drafting only tools and hazards, then using magic to make them all match each other. We tried to balance this approach in so many ways, such as adopting additive instead of multiplicative scoring or adding other new elements, but eventually solved it by restricting the use of magic on hazard dice. This made it so that if you decided to focus on hazards, you'd usually have to account for both dragons and cave-ins instead of only one. Aside from balancing the scoring, this had the unintended side effect of making hazards feel just a little bit more scary.

The other major problem that Atlas brought to us was that they noticed that in playtests with the maximum number of players — four — the scores for the first round would often be lackluster. Sometimes most players had 0 points or fewer. This is because twenty dice are drafted in each first round, regardless of the number of players, and five dice isn't enough for an interesting score.

To counter this, we added characters to the game, with each player getting one. The basic characters each have two symbols that are the same as the dice, so effectively in the first round of a four-player game, players now score seven dice instead of five, which leads to more exciting scores and more dynamic gameplay. The characters weren't necessary for fewer players, but we observed that everyone liked them, so we decided to keep them for all player counts. They help give players a little guidance for what to focus on, give them an identity, and make the game more replayable.

Solo Mode

Dice Miner's Kickstarter campaign happened in early 2020 at the start of the first Covid-19 lockdown. Jeff challenged us to make a solo mode since we knew a lot of backers would be stuck at home.

This gave us a good project to work on while things were slow. It was somewhat challenging as the game had already gone to print, so it needed to work without any changes to the existing components. We managed to design what we feel is a fun solitaire version of the game and are pretty proud of how it turned out! Playtesting these prototypes at home during Covid was a crucial way to regroup with our families and enjoy some fun games during those difficult times.

Shipping Delays

The original delivery target was Christmas 2020/early 2021, but the impact of Covid on worldwide shipping created all sorts of delays, and the game was stuck in port in China for almost six months. Backers kept a positive attitude and were supportive about an exceptional event out of anyone's control. Atlas handled the delay so well, and in fact Dice Miner was even mentioned on NPR because of a viral tweet about the shipping crisis by Atlas president John Nephew.

Finally, the game started to ship in June 2021. The quality of both the standard and the deluxe edition are outstanding. We are very happy about working with Atlas Games and hope a lot of players will have as much fun playing our second collaboration as we had in making it. For us, designing together is an opportunity to hang out, challenge each other with our disparate perspectives, and push ourselves to do something new. We love working together, so we have recently started on our third collaboration and hope to share with you another fun adventure down the road...