Review: Cubitos (AEG)

Dice love to race. It’s a little-known fact, but true. Sure, they make racing magic happen for cars, camels, spaceships, and more, but they rarely get to race on their own.

Cubitos, from Alderac Entertainment Group, finally gives racing dice their turn on the track. Set in a land where cubes love to roll, Cubitos takes classic push-your-luck gameplay into new directions with custom dice, variable powers, and multiple race tracks.

Grab your dice trays (no really, you’ll want dice trays for this — we aren’t kidding) and roll up the fun with the top five things you need to know about Qubitos.

So Many Dice

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The game includes 121 custom six-sided dice that fall into three basic groups. The starting dice are light and dark gray. On the right roll, they all give you money, but the dark grays can also move your racer on the board.

Ability Dice come in a rainbow of colors. They feature between one to three special faces. A deck of ability cards tells you what the faces do in the game. (More about those in a moment.)

The large Start Player die reminds you which player started the round. It’s also the only die that offers money, movement, or one of the game’s valuable credit tokens.

Coins, Credits, and Movement

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Three kinds of currency drive the players’ strategy in Cubitos: Coins, credits, and movement.

Because this is a race, winning the game takes movement. Players get movement from the feet icons on the dice, from special powers on the Ability Dice, and by spending coins and credits.

Coins let you buy new dice or buy movement. Leftover coins go away at the end of your turn, so spend them freely. Credits last from turn to turn, so you can accumulate them over time and spend them later on some extra movement when it gives you an edge.

Cards Set the Powers

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Every game of Cubitos uses all of the available dice, but what the dice do in the game changes depending on the ability cards you choose during setup.The cards assign specific powers to the symbols on the dice faces and tell you when and how those powers come into play.

Most of the powers do things by themselves such as give you coins, credits, or movement. But the game’s real innovation and excitement comes from the cards that assign combination powers to the dice. Combo powers only work if you have the right colors of dice available in your pool as you do your rolls.

Bringing It Together

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Playing Cubitos starts with choosing one of the racetracks (the game includes two double-sided boards) and selecting cards for the ability dice. (Tip: Keep a log sheet in the box so you can track your favorites and avoid combos that didn’t work for your group.)

All players roll their dice at the same time, moving dice with face-up symbols (what the game calls “hits”) into the Active area of their player boards.

Since this is a push-your-luck game, you can choose to keep rolling or stand pat with what you have. If you roll all blanks (“misses” in game parlance), your turn ends but you gain some fans which could give you extra bonuses.

Movement is pretty straight-forward as you advance your token among the obstacles and bonus spaces on the racetrack. Winning the race means crossing the finish line first (or farthest if two or more players finish at the same time), so don’t get so distracted by buying dice that you forget to spend occasional coins for movement.

If your racer falls behind, Cubitos has a clever catch-up mechanic that lets trailing players roll extra dice depending on how far they are behind the leader.

Some Sanity-Protecting Tips

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As we dove into Cubitos, we found a few easy things that made our game experience more fun, mostly by keeping the dice on the table instead everywhere else.

When assembling the dice tray boxes, use a bit of cellophane tape to pin the big flap in place inside the box. That flap doesn’t attach to anything so it often springs open and dumps dice everywhere.

For your sanity’s sake, play this game with dice trays or a dice tower. It’s not impossible to play without them, but we forecast a 90% chance of frustration with intermittent periods of game delay while digging dice out of the carpet.

Verdict

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Cubitos breathes new life into the classic dice game genre. By messing with everything from the odds of each die’s rolls to the special abilities of the faces to the challenges of the boards, AEG created a replayability monster.

Parents playing with younger kids may need to help them understand with how some ability cards work, but once they get the idea then they’ll probably beat the parents thanks to their willingness to throw caution to the dice rolling winds.

If you love pushing your luck, building combos, and — most of all — rolling lots of dice, then you’re going to love Cubitos.