Dicetopia - Roll With The Punches complements the city and its districts by a new Wasteland board that consists of three new locations, additional missions, scenarios and new faction cards. The locations in the Wasteland work slightly differently than the districts of the base game. This means that the swap actions of the base game that refer to the neighbourhoods, do not access the locations in the Wasteland. Conversely, agents once deployed cannot be removed from the locations again. Likewise, the dice in the Wasteland locations cannot be exchanged with the dice in the city. For Dicetopia pros this might sound a bit confusing at the beginning, but due to the clear design of the new game elements it works almost automatically.

The new actions of the locations of the Wasteland introduce new possibilities, which complement the game principle of Dicetopia very well and add new tactical options to the game.

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Let’s have a closer look at these new locations, Blood Dome, Rabin Sacturary and Nuclear Springs!

• If a player exchanges an agent with a cube on The Blood Dome (there are three additional standard cubes on each extra card), he gets victory points for all cubes matching in colour and value. So the more dice matching, the higher the score. This action certainly is little point in the first rounds of the game, but in the final rounds it can make all the difference.
• Ravin Sanctuary has two options: when visiting this place, a player can either choose to become the next starting player or to use one of the new Protection Tokens that protect one of his own dice from being rolled or swapped. Both actions are quite useful to my taste, of course also strongly dependent on the course of the game and the goal you are pursuing.
• The last new location is called Nuclear Springs. A fitting name! Fortunately no uncontrollable nuclear chain reaction has to be feared, indeed there is no action at all. However, players will receive very valuable Magmacorium Dice when visiting this place. These new dice look dangerous, but are more so for the players who do not own them. They are protected in the same way as the dice with protection tokens, but additionally they act as wilds in terms of their colour. That’s why they also count as white and purple dice in the final scoring. With the right mission cards it might be a promising strategy to go for these dice.

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The new factions, missions and scenarios fit very well to the base game elements and truly expand the game. As a result a lot of new possibilities are offered in the Wasteland with a lot of surprises in store. Thus players are much more asked to reconsider their plans and further steps continuously.

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With Dicetopia - Roll With The Punches, Tobias Hall has brought a worthy extension for Dicetopia to the table. The new actions fit perfectly to the base game and at the same time bring a lot of new impulses that add many new varieties especially for players who have played the base game many times before. While the base game works very well as a two-player game, I recommend a group of three or more players for Dicetopia - Roll With The Punches. In a two-player game you simply can't use a lot of the new actions efficiently. On the other hand the expansion gives you the possibility to play Dicetopia with five players that increase the interaction between the players significantly. So, thumbs up for Dicetopia - Roll With The Punches! It was nice to take a walk through Dicetopia again and have a look at the outskirts of the city.