Review

Pulp Horror with dice

Alte Dunkle Dinge

Adventure game in KNiffel style

A Kniffel or Dice Poker version with a horror theme, disguised as a board game - can this work? In short, yes, it can, but only if you are not expecting a strategic highlight and make do with a dice-driven game of chance instead, featuring a few objective cards demanding a variety of dice combinations, plus a handful of tokens with varying effects, all of which can be played in about an hour.

During Spiel 2014, I came across the original version of the game, „Ancient Terrible Things“ from Pleasant Company Games, and I was excited about it from the first moment. Feuerland Spiele probably felt the same way, because they created a new line for their range of games, the „Blue Label“ games - less demanding games - and starting the line with the German version of Ancient Terrible Things, called „Alte Dunkle Dinge“. This, luckily, meant that this - in my opinion - marvelous dice game did get some attention from the German market.

Players are explorers who want to explore a mysterious river deep in the jungle and to unlock its Ancient Secrets, following the example of Spaniard Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, who was the first European to explore the Amazon River. For this purpose, you make ready a varying number of cards for Ominous Encounters - featuring various dice combinations and a number of victory points in relation to the difficulty - and “Dunkle Dinge” tokens.

In the Riverboat Phase, six Fateful Locations are - provided they are empty - equipped with Ominous Encounter cards from the draw pile, sorted in ascending order. All locations have certain advantages for a player who visits them, for instance, additional Focus, Fate, Treasure or Courage markers, but also actions for swapping cards or tokens or becoming the new starting player. The newly placed cards are, according to the images on them, equipped with one or two tokens.

In the Explore Phase, players visit the locations on which there are cards left, take the marker or markers on the location, and then either do the so-called Desperate Act by discarding the necessary number of Courage tokens, which means that the Fateful Encounter has been mastered without rolling dice. Or you try to achieve the currently necessary dice combination, which takes us the core of the game, the Encounter Phase.

The fixed dice value combinations that are familiar from Kniffel are very interestingly and varied for the Encounter phase. A die of value 4 that is pictured means that at least one die must show for pips or more. A Multiple (2, 3, 4 etc.), for instance with three dice of value 2 means that minimum three dice must have value 2 or higher. This must not be confused with, for instance, a demand of 4-4-4, which means plain and simple that at least three dice must have value 4 or more, but need not show the same value - so this demand could be met with a result of 4-4-5.

A similar system is used for the necessary straights, using varying numbers of dice (three to five) and different minimum values (smallest value of the straight.

By the way, you always have five green basis dice at your command and can re-roll up to two times. However, if you want only to re-roll a certain number of the dice instead of all of them, you must discard one green focus marker for each die, for the so-called “focused” rolling; only the re-rolling of all green dice at once is free of charge. As it is very difficult or near impossible to master the difficult combinations, for instance 5-5-5-5-5 on the high-value encounter cards with up to 10 victory po9ints, there are of course a few special dice of different colors, which you can acquire in the Trading Post Phase at the end of the turn and which you can also manipulate with the help of blue, so-called Feat cards. With such a card, you need not discard a focus marker for the yellow “Luck” dice when doing a focused roll. The red Panic dice are rolled only once in addition to the five green basic dice, but can never be re-rolled. The value of a blue Feat die can be raised by 1 when you discard a blue Feat token. Each player also has three Feat cards in each round, which you can also use for various advantageous actions at the cost of discarding Feat tokens.

All dice that you did not need in your encounter can be used according to several different scenario cards provided in the game - one of them is chosen at the start of the game - you can swap them for various tokens, which is also very important to acquire the much coveted and demanded focus tokens or the yellow treasure tokens. In this game, too, the governing motto is „money talks“, because those yellow treasure markers enable you to buy up to four equipment cards in every turn. Those equipment cards are very useful, either permanently or for a once-only use. From various ways to manipulate dice results to additional dice - red, yellow, blue - up to even additional victory points they provide all that an explorer could wish for!

One very important phase of the game has not been mentioned so far: The Terrible Things Phase, a phase that is triggered whenever a player does not manage to achieve the dice combination in demand. In that case, a „Terrible Thing“ token of the lowest value (from 0 to 3 negative points) is taken from the travel track and the Encounter card is put on the Rumours case on the board. And with that we have arrived at one of two possible end-of-game conditions: The game ends either when the last „Terrible Thing“ token has been taken from the board or when there are no Encounter cards available when new cards would have to be placed on locations at the start of the River Boat phase.

A real visually and thematically tidbit for all those who do not really mind that - at a close look - this is only a dice game, after all, set in a horror setting. But it is a dice game that is a great lot of fun to play, with a playing time that is not too long and with rules that are quickly explained and immediately understood. The rules of the new German edition differ marginally from the English original, but that is probably due to the editorial adaptation. All in all, a commendable dice game variant which I can recommend without reservation to all fans of dice games.

Gert Stöckl

Players: 2-4

Age: 14+

Time: 60+

Designer: Simon McGregor

Artist: Rob van Zyl

Price: ca. 35 EUR

Publisher: Feuerland Spiele 2015

Web: www.feuerland-spiele.de

Genre: Dice, horror

Users: With friends

Version: multi

Rules: de en + pt

In-game text: no

Comments:

Smashing design

Thrilling topic

Standard mechanisms

Compares to:

All games with achieving dice combinations

Other editions:

Pleasant Company Games (en), Redbox (pt)

My rating: 5

Gert Stöckl:

A nice Kniffel version featuring new dice combinations and packed into a horror setting

Chance (pink): 3

Tactic (turquoise): 1

Strategy (blue): 0

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 0

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0