Presenting the nominees of the sixteenth annual Dice Tower Awards for games released in 2022 in categories including artwork, small publisher, new designer, and the game of the year! Tom Vasel and Zee Garcia announced the nominees at the Spring Spectacular on April 18th, 2022
2022
Image

Based on simple and intuitive hand management, Heat: Pedal to the Metal puts players in the driver's seat of intense car races, jockeying for position to cross the finish line first, while managing their car's speed if they don't want to overheat. Selecting the right upgrades for their car will help them hug the curves and keep their engine cool enough to maintain top speeds. Ultimately, their driving skills will be the key to victory!
Drivers can compete in a single race or use the "Championship System" to play a whole season in one game night, customizing their car before each race to claim the top spot of the podium. They have to be careful as the weather, road conditions, and events will change every race to spice up their championship. Players can also enjoy a solo mode with the Legends Module or add automated drivers as additional opponents in multiplayer games.
—description from the publisher
Drivers can compete in a single race or use the "Championship System" to play a whole season in one game night, customizing their car before each race to claim the top spot of the podium. They have to be careful as the weather, road conditions, and events will change every race to spice up their championship. Players can also enjoy a solo mode with the Legends Module or add automated drivers as additional opponents in multiplayer games.
—description from the publisher
Year Published:
2022
Designers:
Asger Harding Granerud
Publishers:
Days of Wonder
Image

2022
Image

"Codes are a puzzle. A game, just like any other game."
- Alan Turing in The Imitation Game.
Turing Machine is a fascinating and competitive deduction game. It offers a unique experience of questioning a proto-computer that works without electricity or any sort of technology, paving the way for a new generation of deduction games.
The Goal? Find the secret code before the other players, by cleverly questioning the machine. With Turing Machine, you’ll use an analog computer with unique components made of never-before-seen perforated cards.
The game offers more than seven million problems from simple to mind-staggeringly complex combinations, making the gameplay practically endless!
Including the original competitive mode, you can combine your brain power as a team or try to beat the game itself while playing solo.
Are you ready for an intense cerebral gaming experience?
- Alan Turing in The Imitation Game.
Turing Machine is a fascinating and competitive deduction game. It offers a unique experience of questioning a proto-computer that works without electricity or any sort of technology, paving the way for a new generation of deduction games.
The Goal? Find the secret code before the other players, by cleverly questioning the machine. With Turing Machine, you’ll use an analog computer with unique components made of never-before-seen perforated cards.
The game offers more than seven million problems from simple to mind-staggeringly complex combinations, making the gameplay practically endless!
Including the original competitive mode, you can combine your brain power as a team or try to beat the game itself while playing solo.
Are you ready for an intense cerebral gaming experience?
Year Published:
2022
Designers:
Fabien Gridel
Publishers:
Le Scorpion Masqué
Image

2022
Image

Designed by Stan Kordonskiy (Dice Hospital, Rurik, Lock Up), developed by Jonny Pac (Coloma, Sierra West, Lions of Lydia), solo mode by Drake Villareal (Solani, Spook Manor), and illustrated by The Mico (Raiders of the North Sea, Paladins of the West Kingdom, Valeria), Endless Winter: Paleoamericans takes place in North America, around 10,000 BCE. Players guide the development of their tribes across several generations—from nomadic hunter-gatherers to prosperous tribal societies. Over the course of the game, tribes migrate and settle new lands, establish cultural traditions, hunt paleolithic megafauna, and build everlasting megalithic structures.
Endless Winter is a euro-style game that combines worker placement and deck building in an innovative way. Each round, players send their tribe members to various action spaces, and pay for the actions by playing cards and spending resources. Tribe cards grant additional labor, while Culture cards provide a variety of unique effects. As an alternative, cards can be saved for an end-of-round Eclipse phase, where they are simultaneously revealed to determine the new player order, and trigger various bonus actions.
The game features a novel blend of interwoven systems and mechanisms, such as multi-use cards, area influence, tile placement, and set collection. Plus, there are many viable paths to victory. After four brisk rounds, scores are tallied, and the tribe with the most points wins!
—description from the publisher
Endless Winter is a euro-style game that combines worker placement and deck building in an innovative way. Each round, players send their tribe members to various action spaces, and pay for the actions by playing cards and spending resources. Tribe cards grant additional labor, while Culture cards provide a variety of unique effects. As an alternative, cards can be saved for an end-of-round Eclipse phase, where they are simultaneously revealed to determine the new player order, and trigger various bonus actions.
The game features a novel blend of interwoven systems and mechanisms, such as multi-use cards, area influence, tile placement, and set collection. Plus, there are many viable paths to victory. After four brisk rounds, scores are tallied, and the tribe with the most points wins!
—description from the publisher
Year Published:
2022
Designers:
Stan Kordonskiy
Publishers:
Fantasia Games
Image

2022
Image

Artisan dragons, the smaller and magically talented versions of their larger (and destructive) cousins, are sought by shopkeepers so that they may delight customers with their flamecraft. You are a Flamekeeper, skilled in the art of conversing with dragons, placing them in their ideal home and using enchantments to entice them to produce wondrous things. Your reputation will grow as you aid the dragons and shopkeepers, and the Flamekeeper with the most reputation will be known as the Master of Flamecraft.
In Flamecraft, 1-5 players take on the role of Flamekeepers, gathering items, placing dragons and casting enchantments to enhance the shops of the town. Dragons are specialized (bread, meat, iron, crystal, plant and potion) and the Flamekeepers know which shops are the best home for each. Visit a shop to gain items and a favor from one of the dragons there. Gathered items can be used to enchant a shop, gaining reputation and the favors of all the dragons in the shop. If you are fortunate enough to attract fancy dragons then you will have opportunities to secure even more reputation.
—description from publisher
In Flamecraft, 1-5 players take on the role of Flamekeepers, gathering items, placing dragons and casting enchantments to enhance the shops of the town. Dragons are specialized (bread, meat, iron, crystal, plant and potion) and the Flamekeepers know which shops are the best home for each. Visit a shop to gain items and a favor from one of the dragons there. Gathered items can be used to enchant a shop, gaining reputation and the favors of all the dragons in the shop. If you are fortunate enough to attract fancy dragons then you will have opportunities to secure even more reputation.
—description from publisher
Year Published:
2022
Designers:
Manny Vega
Publishers:
Cardboard Alchemy
Image

2022
Image

The city-building board game Foundations of Rome puts you into the role of an architect competing to own land and build magnificent structures! Build domūs and insulae, fountains, foundries, and more to increase your renown - gaining glory for yourself and the empire! With 96 wonderfully detailed miniatures in the base game, Foundations of Rome is a testament to the glory of Rome that you can bring to the table.
Foundations of Rome is the next, and biggest game to date, in the Dice Tower Essentials line and is designed by famed designer Emerson Matsuuchi.
On a player's turn they select from purchasing a new lot, building a new building in the shared city of Rome, or collecting income!
Players collect Glory Points at the end of each round based on the population and commerce they have brought to the city as well as gaining glory for civic buildings that score not only based on their own buildings, but those of their opponents!
With a quick setup time and easy to learn to rules you will be on your way to achieving glory within Rome in no time!
—description from the publisher
Foundations of Rome is the next, and biggest game to date, in the Dice Tower Essentials line and is designed by famed designer Emerson Matsuuchi.
On a player's turn they select from purchasing a new lot, building a new building in the shared city of Rome, or collecting income!
Players collect Glory Points at the end of each round based on the population and commerce they have brought to the city as well as gaining glory for civic buildings that score not only based on their own buildings, but those of their opponents!
With a quick setup time and easy to learn to rules you will be on your way to achieving glory within Rome in no time!
—description from the publisher
Year Published:
2022
Designers:
Emerson Matsuuchi
Publishers:
Arcane Wonders
Image

2022
Image

The walls were lined with iron shelves, each metal slat overfilled with glass jars containing formaldehyde and grotesque curiosities within. Pristine brass tools and refined metals of a quality I had never before laid eyes upon were strewn across sturdy slabs of rock and wood, their edges sharp with use. However, my eyes were soon drawn to a sturdy writing desk, its mahogany eaves inlaid with thin strips of copper, the center of which contained a well-worn leather-bound book. My father's journal — passed down to me and representing years of knowledge and countless experiments. And inside that weathered tome, atop the pearly parchment oxidized yellow at its frayed edges, were the deliberate quill marks of a crazed genius outlining the ambitious project he could never complete in one lifetime — his masterwork.
Without realizing it, my hands were shaking as I clutched the book to my chest. At once, I felt an ownership and anxiety for the scientific sketches scrawled so eloquently on those frayed sheets. It was at that moment that I began my obsession: I would restore this laboratory to its former brilliance and dedicate my life to completing my father's work!
In My Father's Work, players are competing mad scientists entrusted with a page from their father's journal and a large estate in which to perform their devious experiments. Players earn points by completing experiments, aiding the town in its endeavors, upgrading their macabre estates, and hopefully completing their father's masterwork.
But they have to balance study and active experimentation because at the end of each generation, all of their experiments and resources are lost to time until their child begins again with only the "Journaled Knowledge and Estate" they have willed to them — and since the game is played over the course of three generations, it is inevitable that the players will rouse the townsfolk to form angry mobs or spiral into insanity from the ethically dubious works they have created. The player with the most points at the end of three generations wins and becomes the most revered, feared, ingenious scientist the world has ever known!
—description from the publisher
Without realizing it, my hands were shaking as I clutched the book to my chest. At once, I felt an ownership and anxiety for the scientific sketches scrawled so eloquently on those frayed sheets. It was at that moment that I began my obsession: I would restore this laboratory to its former brilliance and dedicate my life to completing my father's work!
In My Father's Work, players are competing mad scientists entrusted with a page from their father's journal and a large estate in which to perform their devious experiments. Players earn points by completing experiments, aiding the town in its endeavors, upgrading their macabre estates, and hopefully completing their father's masterwork.
But they have to balance study and active experimentation because at the end of each generation, all of their experiments and resources are lost to time until their child begins again with only the "Journaled Knowledge and Estate" they have willed to them — and since the game is played over the course of three generations, it is inevitable that the players will rouse the townsfolk to form angry mobs or spiral into insanity from the ethically dubious works they have created. The player with the most points at the end of three generations wins and becomes the most revered, feared, ingenious scientist the world has ever known!
—description from the publisher
Year Published:
2022
Designers:
T. C. Petty III
Publishers:
Renegade Game Studios
Image
