Dice as deck engine but 0 waste is great. Love score boards. As dice the tactile and modular aspect is great. That’s the end of my positive reviews.

Few alternate cards or strategies for engine building. Fixed and short game length. Need alternate faces. Suffers from as euro style over simplification to try to widen user base. Not even card names and the everything as symbol is horrible. It works for dice and market but bit cards. Even 7 wonders knows that.

Can win without hammer if you play a low gold dice strategy and want to not buy expensive faces and get right into buying fire and moon faces.

Score boards awesome with due cuts and extensions that lock together and if you bump table cubes wont move. But unneeded stuff. Spot for dice when you roll every turn is silly and holes for 0s is silly. It wont be 0 forever.

I really want to love dice forge but have issues almost everywhere.

Yes it feels like a dice deck builder making my engine. I love that unlike most such games there is 0 wasted starter assets you want to trash and eventually replace all. Since you dont start with many dice faces any are better than none because you can get blank results particularly early on. Yes build your awesome dice. Sad there is an entire after market of dice forks like there was for the Ng64 to pull the base RAM out to get the new in. I have mixed feeling on like Valaria force everyone to participate every turn. Yes keeps attentions BUT… I cant even go to the bathroom or get a snack without halting the game for 2 minutes. I’d be more ok if you actually got on with it a just as the inactive player could make all your rolls and per round. Then you know exactly what you will have for next turn to work with.

The game is short with what 9-10 rounds. The predefined length of game is very short. Just about the time your engine starts moving the game ends. I’d prefer another win condition that isnt fixed like 1st to a VP number or once x number of cards or market items are gone. It becomes a few strategies and if you make a less optimal choice possible by not affording a thing a few times you lose. I’ve seen people do well without hammer or chest. Just plan to say only buy maybe 1-2 gold faces and immediately start buying cards from the rest of faces becoming moon/fire or combo. End of game only barely over flowed gold but did avoid the 12 costs.

Sadly fire and moon have issues also. Fire has perk you can spend fir extra card buying actions and costs more than moon. And moon gets slightly different return on cards but otherwise is not special. If you only have 2 resources to buy cards with both need to have special features. Moon could have been spend for extra market buys or allow you to convert any gold, fire or moon into each other ect. You basically have 2 resource types that dont mix. Gold for dice faces and fire and moon for cards.
I love love the score boards and extensions and die cut holes for token cubes. I’m totally borrowing that idea for my own. Love how like the dice it’s very tactile and locks together so if the table is bumbed everything stays where it should and doesn’t all roll away. There are sadly several totally unneeded spots. It has 2 spots to set your dice just because but since you roll every turn they wont gather any dust. Also it has 0 point cut outs which is silly since you could just set it somewhere like on the symbol.

They over euro-fied the game. In the quest to make 0 text to be translated which works for the market and dice there are not even card names. “Ya my favorite card is the ox guy” “you mean minotaur?” “Ya that thing”. The symbols are so horrible and make little sense unless you played a few times but by then you have uses but all the replay value. Look even 7 wonders has many annoying symbols but has card names. Or look to the big 3. MtG, pokemon and yugioh. They all know you need card names and CAN NOT symbolize every thing. They usually have resources and a handful of core elements as icons only and yes use the evil text for names of abilities or descriptions. You can over simplify a thing and lose value and dice forge did that. I want to love it more but have issues at almost every part.

I agree. It’s quite fun at first but doesn’t have a lot to keep you invested over time. It might slip into my “games to get rid of” shelf soon.

The game needs more variety in die face combinations that are accomplished early on, rather than the above-mentioned strategy that’s won in 8/8 games that we’ve played.

Bottom-line: The game is fun a few times, then rapidly spirals down into a predictable bowl of meh, destined to stay on the unplayed game closet shelf for a long, long time.