Arcane Wonders Spoils of War Game

Love how easy this game is to learn and play. It takes liars dice to the next level and breaths new life into it.

Such a fun game. More intense version of liars dice. Seller filled package with cardboard instead of plastic non biodegradable plastics 👍🏻

Fun game that adds a great twist to liars dice. New strategies to get extra gold to win the game! I give it 8 out of 10 stars.

Spoils of War is Liars Dice on steroids. It's a game of bidding, bluffing, and hoping the luck you are pushing will hold. Lots of loot up for grab: gold, treasure cards, armor, weapons, and artifacts! But...you can't just keep and hold. You have to bed gold in the dice game but be cautious because gold also contributes to victory points for winning, so players have to calculate how much to bet enough to win but not so much that losing sinks your strategy. Even trickier: you don't know what the other players have! Play works like this: each player rolls a cupful of dice and peeks at the results, then the bidding start. The player who is the Viking Chief will call out a number of dice and a value (“Three 2s”). They’re betting that they can find three dice showing 2 among ALL the rolled dice, not just their own cup. The next player (called the "declarer) has to modify the bid: either by a higher number ("three 3s") or the total number of dice (“five 4s”). Players continue until someone challenges. Once challenged, the challenger and the declarer (person who made the last bid) ante up a few gold to back their bid. The other players bet on who is right. So there is a lot of social interaction and kind of a fascinating study of how and who people decide to back. The social component is the most fun, since every player is involved in every round of bidding. You might encourage someone to challenge as you know you don't have any of those dice. Or perhaps you have the full set but encourage them to challenge because you want to back the other player's bet. The winning bettor and backers grabs the loot. There are bonuses if players manage to put together some sets. Artifacts are also bonuses - they allow rule bending (peek at other dice; move a dice to a different number, etc). There are a total of 9 rounds. So play is around 30-45 minutes based on the number of players and the level of decisiveness of the players. If you have a bunch of folks who can't make up their mind, obviously it takes longer. If you have folks really good at probability, just back them. :) Definitely a lot of fun, especially with the social aspect

It's a fun bidding and bluffing game. But it's really a lot of the same. It doesn't take too long for it to get into a rut of just doing the same thing over and over. I think it's fun for a get together, but a group that plays games together won't get much mileage out of it. It's not that it's bad. It mostly works. There's some logical and deductive thinking as you try to figure out how many dice of each number are out there. There's some bluffing as you try to portray numbers higher than you can really back up to try and push others to bid higher. Then you figure out who were the winners and the losers. From there you can collect cards for points and for advantages. The advantages are the only thing that do mix things up with the ability to peek or even change dice after the roll. Most of the cards give cool little advantages and work well. A couple don't work well. One of the cards is the spyglass which lets you look at the dice of one of the other players before you bid and it's reusable. That's too much of an advantage especially if there are fewer players! Then there's an ability that you get people to show the lowest and highest die. It's pretty worthless because we rarely saw anything other than sixes and ones... Then the game can be somewhat broken by bidding high. Yes, there is an alternate rule to fix this, but to me it just shows that the game isn't balanced. If someone wants to start the first bid at 10 dice they can increase the chance of getting the vote their way or forcing an opponent to make too high of a bid. Also, it may remove the other people from the bidding process. Then after that, it's just not as exciting as it could be. Everyone has the same amount of dice so it's pretty easy to make an educated guess. Once you find guesses that work for you, you tend to stick with those guesses. Play the game a couple times with the same people, and you'll get in a rut. There's nothing more to do, so it gets old pretty fast without new players. There's nothing more to do other than to bid and see the results over and over. It was fun to play a couple of times, but it's not terribly exciting after that. It was easy to pick up and learn. The artwork and the components are well done. It's not bad, but I'm not going to go around telling people how great the game is. I thought this would be Liar's Dice with a little more game to it, but I totally like Liar's Dice better. I totally suggest you buy Liar's Dice instead of this.