Silmaris: Dice Kingdom

I really enjoyed this one. Like any dice game, this is all about risk management and rolling with the punches. This goes well with the kingdom strategy and choose your own adventure dueling aspects of the game. All the systems work well together and give you significant and often difficult choices to mitigate the odds. Unique, easy to pick up, simple systems that have depth (you can win your way), affordable price, cool story that will take many playthroughs to see all it has to offer (Im 20 hours in and still havent seen all the endings). I highly recommend for all of these reasons.

I've had the privilege of playing Silmaris for a few months now, and it's a really fun game that blends random dice rolls with choices and story telling. I enjoyed the game far more than I thought I would. It's hard to beat, and gives you a reason to keep coming back trying different strategies. While the same missions and story elements reemerge each game, there are a lot of random events that can throw a wrench or even help you out each game. This gives the game replayability and makes it well worth the price tag. Here is a video of me streaming a couple of games. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSrst06vJWc&feature=youtu.be

-It's similar to "King of Dragon Pass". There are some parallels. In my opinion King of Dragon Pass is a little deeper in terms of story, but Silmaris is more approachable and a little cleaner in terms of interface, game-play etc. -It's a great little game if you want something casual but not easy and with enough variety and unpredictability to keep it enjoyable and interesting. -After playing many hours there is no clear definitive one-size-fits-all path to victory. Seems like a variety of approaches could be effective. -It took several tries to achieve victory for the first time. I'm still interested to keep playing and try different approaches and explore different story pathways. -Picking story branches is structured in a "Choose Your Own Adventure" kind of way. Things happen, and you decide between options of how to deal with them, which leads to different benefits and/or penalties. This is roughly a third of the game. -It has that "Just one more turn!!" quality to it. You end up wanting to keep going. -You will probably fail a lot. The random story events are not impossible to beat, but they can potentially really damage you. Things can get pretty merciless this way, but it's fun to learn from your mistakes and come back to try again. The story stuff is a source of randomness, and thus potentially frustration, but in my opinion the randomness aspect is challenging but manageable, and not unfair.

The game is a great indie mashup of turn-based strategy and a book whose you are the hero. The tabbletop feeling and the clean interface make the experience really sweet.