Diceborn Heroes


Overview

In this cooperative game, you can choose from four different fantasy character classes at the start (Fighter, Thief, Mage, Priest), but there are two of each class, so it’s possible to create a party with a different mix, even with four players. As you progress from the first quest to the third quest and then the boss fight, your character levels up, and you get a new character card after Quest 1 and Quest 2, but get to keep one of the abilities from your previous character card. The level-up path is linear, with two branches per level, per character class. Mage/Priest and Fighter/Thief have intersecting choices, but also have some choices unique to the starting class.

Each character card has 3 abilities. The starting characters only use green dice, but later character types have access to red and blue dice. Some abilities require one die colour or the other, so it lends a bit more chance to the rolling of the dice.

When rolling, you don’t always want to roll high, although some abilities can only be activated with higher-value die rolls. However, playing only low dice is occasionally a good tactic, because monsters’ “die roll” cards will miss if there are no hero-dice in play with that value or above.

There are few little niceties in the game. For example: every character card is available as a male or female, so the player can choose based on their gender if they want.

House Rules and Errata

We found that this game had a lot of situations where the rules didn’t QUITE clearly describe exactly what the rule was. So… in case you have the same problem, here’s how WE chose to play it.

Counter + Shield

You don’t get the shield icon until your die-number comes up, but the counter damage always happens, UNLESS you get your die stolen, in which case your counter doesn’t go off after the die is stolen.

We realize that this judgement is unlike when a Monster pulls the Shield card, in which case it gets a shield right away. However, we feel it gives more meaning to the number you put on the Counter ability.

Silverfang on a Monster

Card says: enemy can only attack Silverfang. We took this to mean that even if the monster can multi-target attack, his attack only hits Silverfang and no others.

Ally with Assigned Die

We give allies a die from the dice bank, with the number shown. We do NOT assign a hero’s die to “activate” the ally. We assume that it’s much harder to keep the ally alive if they have a die auto-assigned to them each round, rather than being able to keep them alive simply because they have no die against which the monsters can target.