Blood Dice

Blood Dice is a dice game commonly found among the Vostani. It is a representation of single combat between two warriors, and evokes the back and forth struggle of two evenly matched foes locked in a struggle to the death. It is played with a set of six dice for each player, and is always played with only two players. Warriors of the Vostani often use this to pass the time among tribe mates, especially during the frigid cold of winter when actual combat is less likely to occur.

How to Play

Each die has six sides and four symbols: one skull, two shields, one rune, and one blank. Each symbol represents a particular result when rolled. A skull is a hit, a shield is a block, a rune can be re-rolled, and a blank is a failure to either hit or block.

Each player takes has a set of six dice. The goal of the game is to reduce your opponent's 'hand' of dice to zero by inflicting hits. As the game goes on and each side loses dice, the tension grows as the player's ability to inflict and block hits is reduced, representing the fatigue of prolonged combat.

An example throw, here we have one hit, three blocks, and two runes. One rerolls dice showing these rune results until they do not have any more of them showing.

After the rerolls, we have two hits, three blocks, and a miss!

The opponent, after re-rolling runes, has two hits, two blocks, and two misses. To score each toss, subtract each players blocks from their opponents hits, any remaining hits remove the dice of the other player. In this case, all blocks are equal to or greater than hits, so there is no damage.

Again, the blocks exceed the hits, and nothing happens. Because there is only one hit and two block icons on each die, this is likely to happen a lot. One can imagine two warriors battering each other's shields in a deadly dance of blades.

Ouch! Warrior A only has one block compared to warrior B's three hits. Warrior A will lose two dice and only throw four next toss. Warrior B will lose one die himself, since warrior A rolled two hits and B only had one block. Both of our warriors are growing tired, but warrior A is definitely worse off than his foe.

Here we have the next toss, with only four and five dice being thrown. Again, no damage. Our mighty adversaries continue to seek advantage.

Warrior A, here, is going to lose one die because he has NO blocks; he will be down to three next throw. He got three hits though, so warrior B will lose two dice, putting him down to three as well!

After about four more rounds, warrior B is down to two dice. Warrior A tosses a hand of all hits! Warrior B is reduced to zero dice, vanquished by his foe!

You can play Blood Dice as well!

This is actually a game I came up with a couple years ago using the dice from the Betrayal at Calth box set from Games Workshop. Because almost everybody who bought one of these boxes only wanted the figures inside, a set of twelve of these dice can be easily found on Ebay for around $10 U.S. Have fun!

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