Today’s review finds us entering a strange new world. A world where everything is a cube. Fruit. Dogs. Beach balls, probably… And, of course, an anthropomorphic block of cheese wearing lederhosen. It’s right there on the cover of Cubitos, a new game from AEG, and it sets the comedic tone for this dice-pool-building racing game. So is Cubitos an amazing race, or is there sauerkraut in my lederhosen…? Let’s find out!

The Setup

Each player takes his or her pieces, which include two Runner figures, one Player board, one Phase token, seven light gray starting dice, and two dark gray starting dice.

Then you’ll choose a card set. The game has eight different colored dice, and there are a number of different cards for each color, so the combinations are huge. You’ll pick one set of eight cards to use each game. There’s a recommended set for your first game, and then a bunch of premade sets for games beyond that. You can randomly create your own set, too, though the game provides some guidelines to follow to ensure a fun game that doesn’t lock up or get bogged down.

The you’ll pick one of the four included racetracks. They’re of differing difficulties, and the rulebook has suggestions for card set/track combinations.

Then you’ll set the dice and tokens up in their “trays".” The game comes with boxes that store each color of dice (and some for tokens, too) in between games, and then act as a holding tray for during the game. It’s a nifty addition that’s totally unnecessary but cool all the same.

Pick a start player and you’re ready to roll! Literally!

The Gameplay

The player boards are super helpful here. They’re broken into four Zones: Draw, Roll, Active, and Discard.

Roll Phase

You start out by moving dice from your Draw Zone to the Roll Zone. You can pick any dice you have available but only a certain number of them, based on your current draw amount. You start the game with the ability to draw 9, but that can increase through various means.

You roll all of the dice. If they’re all misses (meaning no symbol at all), then you bust! You move all of those dice you just rolled into your Discard Zone, and then you can choose to move any dice in your Active Zone over to your Discard Zone as well. Then as a consolation you move your Runner figure one space on the Fan track—taking any Credits or Draw tokens you might land on.

As long as one of your dice has a symbol on it, then you can keep pressing your luck—or stop if you’re happy with what you’ve got. If you press your luck and roll all misses, and you have at least three dice in the Active Zone, you bust and don’t get any of the things you rolled earlier in the turn. But until you have three dice in that Active Zone, you can’t bust, so roll away!

Once you’re happy with what you’ve rolled, you move the dice showing symbols into the Active Zone (leaving the blanks in your Roll Zone) and wait for other players to be done. You can do this phase simultaneously, or take turns. Once everyone knows what they’re doing, it really does speed things up to have everyone just do this phases at the same time.

If you’re the first player, you’ll also roll the Start Player die, which doesn’t count toward your total when grabbing dice at the start of your turn, and which can also affect other aspects of the game, such as tiebreakers and so forth. It passes to the next clockwise player each turn.

Run Phase

You’ll do the following steps in order.

1) Use Abilities, Resolve [Stabbies], and Determine Total Money and Movement

Some cards might have Run Abilities, which you’ll do now. Then each player compares the number of Sword symbols in the Active Zone (we call them Stabbies), and resolve the effects of the Red card, which always deals with number of Stabbies. Then you just figure out cash and movement points.

2) Move

For every Foot symbol you have, you can move one space on the racetrack. You can also buy a single movement point for 4 Coins and/or Credits. (You can’t buy movement with Coins/Credit, though.) The difference between the two is that Coins have to be spent that turn, but Credits can be held onto from turn to turn and spent when you want to. Other Runners don’t block your movement, and you don’t have to use all of your movement points. If you land on a space with a reward on it, get that reward!

3) Buy

You can spend any or all of your Coins and Credits to buy new dice. Each dice card has a cost in the upper right. You can buy up to two dice in the same round but they must be different colors. Bought dice go in your Discard Zone.

4) Discard

Move all dice from your from your Active Zone to your Discard Zone. Leave the dice in your Roll Zone. Next turn they’ll count against the number of dice you’ll Draw to Roll. So if there are seven dice leftover in your Roll Zone, you’ll only gather two from your Draw Zone.

Again, this phase can be done simultaneously, though there will definitely be times where you’ll need to slow down and go person by person from the starting player. Some players might want to see what others do before they go. Or there might only be one of a certain color die left to buy, so it can make a difference.

In addition to the normal spaces on the various tracks, there are all kinds of other spaces that mess with things in good and bad ways. Some gain you Credits. Some get you a free die of your choice. Some make you lose a die of your choice—though you can choose one of your starting gray dice, so this is a great way to cull your dice pool. There are even shortcuts that let you pay to move to a specific space.

Once someone reaches the finish space, you finish that round and whoever is the furthest is the winner. (So if someone has extra movement, they’ll keep moving beyond the finish space as a tiebreaker. If two people are tied, you play another round until someone is further ahead at the end of it.

With 56 different dice cards, there are a BUNCH of little details and special cases. There’s a large section of the rulebook dedicated to card clarifications.

The Verdict

Jeremiah—Can we talk about components for a hot minute? The amount of component design in this box is outstanding! The tuck boxes that double as storage and a tray for gameplay for every. stinking. die/token/meeple is pretty rad, plus they have diagrams on the side to tell you the sides of the dice so you know the probability of hitting with that die. AND it makes setup and cleanup of a game that could be a nightmare very quick and easy! My only beef is with the insert. I wish there was a way for all the tuck boxes to fit in the insert but—and I may just be bad at Tetris—I haven’t found it yet. I usually tuck a few boxes under the insert to make it all fit without tossing it.

Firestone—Heh. I almost always toss the insert for my games, so I don’t have any expectation on publishers that the insert remain functional after I’ve punched and assembled everything. Yes, those tuck boxes are great. And the dice are good quality with bright colors and clear symbols. And as strange as that art is, it’s also well done. From an art design standpoint, I have zero complaints.

Firestone—There’s so much variety here! Different boards with different layouts and different special spaces. Plus all those different cards. It really helps the replay value. Let’s just look at one color: yellow. It’s our lederhosen-laden block of cheese. The starting card is Reckless Cheese, where each time you push and don’t bust, you get a movement point you use immediately. That’s fun, and encourages pushing your luck. The Bad Cheese card gains you two movement points during the Run phase, along with three Coins, but you lose the die. And the Ledercheesen card says that each time you push and don’t bust, you get to take a die from your Draw Zone and Roll it into your Roll Zone. Each time. Plus during the Run phase you gain one movement point for every four dice in your Active Zone. And there are four other cards, just in that color—and there are seven other colors! Anyway, I love variety and this game has that in spades.

Jeremiah—I’m with you 100%. TONS of variety make the replay value super high and the first time I played with my boys we wanted to play it again, but it was too late in the evening so we spent a few minutes poring over the other cards and dreaming up scenarios, combos, and the synergy between the different varieties. One thing I do not recommend is simply making random draws from each color and running with whatever you get. I made that mistake and it can make certain dice a bit redundant and not really worth the money to nab ‘em. There are a BUNCH of recommended setups (and they even say which racetrack they work best with!) in the rule book. Stick with those for your first couple of games, and then venture into creating your own setup, but don’t do the random thing—it can cripple the game.

Firestone—There’s something inherently nongamer-friendly about race games. There’s a clear goal, and it’s naturally exciting and tense as you’re all working toward that goal. Now, admittedly, this one has a lot of little rules and details when it comes to those cards—even the “easy” first-game set. But this is a game I would absolutely pull out with “next-level” nongamers. Maybe some friends you’ve had over once or twice for games, and who are ready to move on to something more complex than Codenames or Ticket To Ride.

Jeremiah—Yeah, I don’t personally have a ton of race games in my collection (Quicksilver is the only one that comes to mind-and it is fantastic!). But I have played plenty, and many times they can come off a bit flat (Jamaica comes to mind), but Cubitos brings some really fun elements to the genre without muddling the goal: win. If you both win on the same round whoever went furthest wins. But there is a ton of strategy and really hefty choice-making along the way!

Jeremiah—The one downfall of many dice games is if you push your luck and bust you just lost major ground. And there are plenty of dice in the game that make it very enticing to push your luck! So what do you do? Don’t worry. There’s the Fan track, which is a really nice catch-up/evening-out mechanism. If you bust, you get to advance on the Fan track and score a nice bonus, some money, or even an increased number of dice in your Roll Zone! It certainly takes the sting out of busting and adds another nice little nongamer-friendly wrinkle.

Firestone—Agreed. And you also get to possibly roll some extra dice depending on how far behind you are from the people in front of you. All of those catch-up things upset hardcore gamers but make it more nongamer friendly.

If I had one small complaint—and I’m not even sure it’s a complaint—it’s that there’s really no way to affect other people. I don’t like take-that mechanisms in games, but there are more subtle ways to mess with people. The Quest for El Dorado is a great example. Other runners block movement, so you can strategically place yourself in such a way as to mess with opponents without directly messing with opponents. There’s none of that here. And like I said, I’m not even sure we need that. It just feels weird for a race to be way so open and “gracious.” Maybe I’ve played too much Mario Kart over the years.

Jeremiah’s Final Verdict—Just because I don’t have many race games in my collection doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy a really good one! Add Cubitos to that list. I love that aside from being a race game, it’s also a dice game, oh, and it’s a great introduction the the [blank]-building genre—here it’s dice. John D. Clair hits again with another great game, in another genre, with a totally new theme. Well done! Bring Cubitos out with those highly interested non-gamers, or gamers looking for something a touch on the lighter side that doesn’t get stale, and packs in a lot of fun!

Firestone’s Final Verdict—The whole family thought Cubitos was fun. It’s a great combination of mechanisms, but what puts it over the top for me is the press-your-luck aspect. The high-risk/high-reward works here, and elevates it above other games that would have left it out. The variability is off the charts, and it would be easy to add a few more tracks and cards at a low price point as a future expansion. Race games are hit-and-miss for me, and Cubitos is a definite hit.

Cubitos is available now at your favorite local game store.

We’d like to thank AEG for providing review copies of Cubitos, which in no way affected our opinions of the game. We were not compensated in any other way.

Let us know your thoughts on Cubitos! And you can tune in to our podcast next week to hear more thoughts on the game. Thanks for reading!

Jeremiah reviewed Cubitos during the latest episode of That’s How I Roll, check it out below or in your favorite Podcatcher!