Wacky Dice Dreams: Investing in Dice Age

I've really grown to love kickstarter.com--an innovative website that allows people to invest in inventions or creations that they want to see brought to life. Excitingly, this also includes new board game ideas that are looking for funding. It's the womb from whence Alien Frontiers sprang. Would-be investors are pitched about the idea and asked to pledge a varying amount of start-up money in exchange for some thank-you gift (usually a free copy of the game), if the game or creation makes its start-up funding goal.

Recently, TGHITW and I discovered a game-to-be on kickstarter.com that really caught our attention: Dice Age!  This is a unique dice-based game that employs a number of unbalanced, wacky dice in a "game of strategy and risk-taking" (quoting directly from the pitch, here). Here's what the creator also had to say about the game:

 "It was initially a piece of art, and then I developed it into a game. When I first brought them to the university cafeteria, everybody was amazed, wanted one, and couldn't guess how to play. In fact, the rules are pretty simple, but the Dice Age effect is there: You never saw this before."

Take a look at some of these dice, and I think you can see why it made us go "OOoooooOH."

I'm already stoked to start rolling and have some amazing matches. True, I don't even know how it's played yet, but I can already imagine the possibilities and can only guess how competitive this game could be. Its creators are already drawing comparisons between this and Magic the Gathering, and in our household, Magic gets ugly. So damn competitive. So much of my husband stealing a card from my deck, then claiming he didn't and calling me crazy.

I'm also just plain excited because it's so different from anything else I've seen out there. So TGHITW and I decided to make the leap and invest a little mad gaming money into this new game. We've donated enough that we'll be getting a copy of the 23-dice alpha set of the game. Sadly, we couldn't quite afford to donate at the "Adopt a Die" level, where you actually get to godfather (or godmother) a die into existence and get your name listed in the rules book. That would've been something really amazing and special. Sigh.

But, good news! They've already made their funding goals, so the game is definitely going forward! In fact, the funding exceeded even the highest dreams of the creator, and as a reward, each investor is getting a bonus secret Olympus Mons die. More OOoooooOHing. There are 471 total investors as I type this, including yours truly.

I encourage all to go check it out: DICE AGE. In fact, if you check it out by tomorrow (Sunday, June 19), you can still hop on board as an investor. Or, at the very least, you could just make yourself familiar with this interesting new dice game that I will surely be reviewing this September or October. See it at its genesis.