I used to be really into collectable card games like Pokemon, or Magic: The Gathering, but there came a point where I felt like they became too complicated and the cards became too expensive.
Lately, I've been playing a new collectable dice game. It’s called Dice Masters, and, to me, it is just as much fun, but doesn’t cost nearly as much.
Dice Masters plays a lot like Magic, but, of course, with dice instead of cards. You play with two to four characters– superheroes like Wolverine or Spider-Man. At the start of your turn, you draw four dice from your dice bag and roll them. They will either come up as "energy" or as "sidekicks."
Sidekicks are weak characters that you can use to attack or defend from attack, whereas the energy, if you roll enough, will let you activate your heroes and add their dice to your dice bag. The heroes have special powers that activate when you play them, and they are far stronger than sidekicks. These heroes have an attack strength of between 2 and 8 or so, and once you reduce your opponent's health from 20 to zero, you win the match.
I played with the starter set, which has everything you need to play with two players. The rules do seem a little convoluted at first, but the book walks you through a full game, one turn at a time. Once I played through that, the rules all made sense. That first game took about half an hour, but after than they only took about 15 minutes each.
Right now, all of the available sets are of Marvel properties like Avengers and X-Men. But soon, you'll be able to find DC's Justice League characters, as well as characters from Dungeons & Dragons and Yu-Gi-Oh. Those are the expansions that have been announced so far, but I would expect to see several more in the coming months.
