Two Rex Plays #6 - Harvest Dice
In this edition of Two Rex plays we’re discussing Harvest Dice, a roll & write designed by Danny Devine and published by Grey Fox Games. Roll different coloured dice to plant carrots, lettuce, and tomatoes in your vegetable plot, manipulate the price of these goods at market, and feed any surplus food to your pet pig to generate special effects.
Here are the design features we liked:
Minimalist iconography – Crops are represented using simple geometric shapes – triangles for carrots, squares for lettuce, and circles for tomatoes. In some of our designs we’re exploring ideas around what’s fun to ask the player to do on their player sheets, and simplifying iconography is a tool that we’ve found to be effective.
Indirect competitive play – A lot of multiplayer games incorporate zero sum competition mechanics, so that one player’s gain directly leads to another’s loss. In two-player mode, these systems can be quite adversarial – combine them with a few decades of fraternal tension and even chilled farming games about planting carrots and feeding them to charismatic pigs can turn into a bloodbath. Competition in Harvest Dice has more subtle and indirect ways to disrupt your opponent, allowing for more plausible deniability & fewer hurt feelings. This is achieved through the dynamics of a shared dice pool and a common market value for your crops.
Feeding the pig – There are rules around placing your crops which mean that sometimes you’re unable to make a move on the main grid. Rather than lose a go, the relevant dice are converted to pig points, which is thematically consistent with throwing excess vegetables in the trough. Whilst this is a strategy in its own right; it also softens the blow of not being able to carry out your preferred move.
Optional rules add to longevity – Once you’ve mastered the basic version of the game, there are a few optional rule changes that add to the decision space and increase the game’s complexity. The changes are quick to grasp and require little extra addition to the player sheet, and whilst they may appear to be minor tweaks individually, they combine to make a more meaningful impact. We thought this was a well-designed way of extending the life of the game.
Quick but strategic – A two player game should last less than 30 minutes, considerably less once you’re familiar with the rules and the likely strategies that you can pursue. Despite the short play time, the game delivers a satisfying strategic experience.
Strong thematic ties – The core mechanics of growing crops, feeding the pig, and selling at market are all strongly consistent with the theme.
Another aspect that drew us to Harvest Dice is the number of dice - the game comes with 9 (only 6 of which are used in the two-player game). In the latest variation of our game, we’re considering upping the dice count to around these levels and wanted to see how other projects have tackled large numbers of dice. One difference between our effort and Harvest Dice is that we’re trying to increase the number of dice as the game progresses – thematically representing a Looper-style mechanic where future versions of the same time traveller are working together towards a common goal. Whilst this creates an additional complication in getting a single board configuration to scale to multiple dice, it’s a mechanic that creates a pleasing acceleration as the game progresses.
Interested in Harvest Dice? Find out more here:
Harvest Dice Official Website
https://greyfoxgames.com/harvest-dice/
TTS workshop
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2029375502