This game came into being when Steve came to me about doing a dice game. He knew the kinds of mechanics he wanted to see, and he wanted the Fibonnaci Sequence to play a part in it. I got the download and starting seeing what I could do. I started working out the mechanics and developing play, and Steve was pretty happy with what I’d done. It went into testing.
Our early iterations had a very abstract theme, with beautiful components that involved a nautilus shell. PSI, our sales and warehousing company, agreed that it looked great, but hit us with the reality check that it was too abstracted and not gamery enough.
That led us to explore the hacking theme. The basic idea is that you are competing hackers, trying to hack into an important system. This didn't change any of our mechanics, only the look and theme of the game.
Dicehack is special in that the first iteration and the final iteration of the game are very similar. It was regarded by our testers as a good game the first time playing it. We spent the rest of the time making the game play faster and more smoothly.
Like ATK, Dicehack is a reasonably priced game at $40. There are a lot of dice in the box, at the very least, along with individual player boards and a couple of punchcards for tokens. It's also pretty with a heavy tech theme. I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out.
There's enough going on in the game that we found it difficult to provide a quick explanation and demo at Gen Con. That's kind of frustrating, given how smoothly the game plays once you learn. Explaining an abstracted dice game can be challenging.
I'll delve deeper into more granular aspects of the game in future articles.