In the chat about wargaming, dice dropping, and resolving big clashes quickly and excitingly there was mention of a game that resolved clashes by chucking dice into a tower.
I believe this is Wallenstein.
You drop your red army cubes in vs your enemy yellow army cubes and some get stuck and some make it through.
Then you figure losses from there, battles always have a bit of randomness to them from this, otherwise the game seems roughly like Risk?
The other dice towercentric game is Dark Tower, mostly though it spews out skulls onto a map increasing threats you must deal with.
Not so much a DICE tower, but you could easily take the idea of a dice tower in the middle of a board dropping threat cubes through it or something, maybe pull that old Kerplunk tower out of the closet and use that.
There’s something compelling to me about the physical object which could double as a kind of terrain piece (plop a cool dice tower on a battlemat and run a wargame!) and the random funnel like aspect of chucking dice (soldiers) into it and seeing who survives.
Are there some obvious dice tower-y games out there?
Anybody play Dark Tower or Wallenstein?
Have not seen either game though I have a game that uses a similar mechanic (forget the name at the moment). The question is: what could we do if we didn’t want to use a custom tower piece of kit that might supply a similar style of resolution?
Why would you NOT want a cool tower that you throw cubes into?!
As a 90’s kid I will always be partial to games that have a toy element (Fireball Island, Don’t wake Daddy, etc.) so I may be biased.
If you wanted to simulate some randomness you could of course assign different outcomes to the faces of the cubes, d6s with 1’s getting removed and comparing the remaining values against each other or something.
I’m digging the near instant resolution of seeing the number of cubes vs having to check the results of them though.
As well as the physical nature of the cubes landing “randomly” on areas of a hexmap or battlemat.
Ha! It’s more down to the fact that I neither own one of those tower games nor would I want to buy one just to fool around with this concept. Were I a man of handiness I might construct one but alas! So I must look at non-hardware options!
I suppose you could use a bag to draw cubes out of as well.
Red army chucks in their 20 cubes Yellow army chucks in their 10 cubes.
Pull out cubes (1 at a time? 5 at a time?)
Remove them as losses and decide if you want to keep going or not.
Could be a fun way to simulate the pressure of a battle going south on you and having to decide if you want to retreat or sink more resources into it.