Roll, Steal, and Count Your Chips in Rollers Deluxe

Roll the dice and complete your board or steal chips from your opponents, in this push-your-luck dice game.

Published by The Op, and made for 2-6 players, Rollers Deluxe has been redesigned twice into two cooperative games, but here it is in all its competitive glory. So how does it play?

Gameplay

Each player takes a player board that has five columns numbered one through five. At the bottom of each column is a second slot. Each player also starts each game with $15 worth of chips. On your turn, you roll six dice, five green and one red. You can choose any dice to set aside and re-roll the rest. You can reroll up to two times, including any you already set aside. If you roll a zap on the red die, then you cannot set aside or use any dice you rolled on that roll. Green dice can roll 1-5 and wild.

After rolling you can apply your dice. You are trying to open and close each numbered column on your board. To open it, you must, in a single turn, spend dice showing that column’s value and the same number of dice as that column’s value. So, for example, to open the five column you need to spend five 5s. When you open a column, you place a token on it to mark it as open. To close a column, it must be first opened, and you must spend an additional die of that column’s value and then you place a token in the space beneath the column. A column can be opened and closed on the same or different turns.

When a column is opened and closed, you can spend a die of that column’s value to steal chips from an opponent. You may only steal chips from someone who has not closed that same column on his own board, and you take chips equal to that column’s value.

The first player to close all his columns ends the round and earns two points. The player with the most chips at the end of the round earns one point. You then set up the game for a new round, discarding all tokens on your player boards and resetting everyone’s chip count to 15. The first player to score five points wins.

If a player runs out of chips during a round, he is not eliminated. However, he cannot steal chips from other players for the rest of that round and if he is the first to complete his board then he only scores one point.

Review

Rollers Deluxe is a fun, light dice game that doesn’t take a lot of thought but is still engaging and offers some fun player interaction. There’s an enjoyable push-your-luck element to the gameplay as you choose which columns to try to roll for on your turn, and as you react to what the dice give you.

The core mechanics of Rollers Deluxe have been reimplemented into two cooperative games, Kingdom Hearts Perilous Pursuit and Fantastic Beasts: Perilous Pursuit. Having played those games first, it’s interesting to see a competitive version — it works well as a competitive game. The ability to steal chips from other players is very interesting and adds incentives to try to close off certain numbers before others to keep your chips safe. This increases player interaction and causes you to make different choices based on what other players have chosen to do.

Both the components and theme are a little bland and uninspired, however. The theme just isn’t exciting and all of the tokens you place on your board are only one-sided. Also, there are no bags included in the box to keep these tokens sorted from each other. The dice, however, are quite nice and fun to roll: important for a dice game.

The rulebook is also a little vague on a key element. When you end the round by closing your fifth column, do you still get to resolve the rest of your dice? This can be quite important as it can make a difference in who has the most chips at the end of the round, which can in turn easily change who wins the game. Nor do the rules reference what to do if two players tie for the most chips.

A little flawed, Rollers Deluxe is still a fun dice game that leaves plenty of room for players to chat and enjoy a mellow evening while still having an interesting game to play around with.

Pros: The dice are well made, good player interaction, the chip stealing mechanism adds some interesting choices

Cons: Some points are not clarified in the rulebook, components and theme could be better

Disclosure: we received a complimentary review copy of this game.