I’ve backed a lovely little dice game called Dungeon Dice. It’s a highly interactive game about trawling through a dungeon full of monsters and treasures, this time using dice to represent your level, monsters, spells, treasures, and artifacts (special treasures). The goal is to reach 3-4 fame points before anyone else.

The interactiveness comes from the deals and trades that players can make with one another. Many monsters are tough to beat on your own, especially at the beginning of the game when you don’t have the experience to level up, and, like Settlers of Catan, you’re not going to get ahead by refusing to make deals with everyone. “I’ll help you for a 50/50 chance at the treasure.” “You have a skeleton key, why not help me so that you can get a chance at an artifact?” This interactivity works even in 2-player mode.

I like this game because of the variety of dice involved, and because dice rolling and dungeon delving just work together—and the dice mechanics in Dungeon Dice abbreviate the typical D&D monster bashing experience.

If you don’t want to back yet, or are still hesitant about it, check out the Kickstarter page. They’ve got detailed explanations of the components and rules, as well as three gameplay videos about 2/3rds down the page. They even have a link to a free print-and-play download—print onto a large sticker sheet, cut and apply to 16mm dice, et voila. Warning—there are a lot of dice involved!

Best of all? They’ve been funded and are on their way to stretch goals. Someone has also backed them at a high enough level to add two special Kickstarter-exclusive monster dice to the game!