Yahtzee Souls!

And that was the title of the game Andrew, Chris, Mark, Joe and I created this afternoon. It takes after the Dark Souls game in that the first iterations were incredibly difficult and we ended up dying a lot, mainly me... In a nutshell the game was a combat focussed RPG using a combat system that revolved around the scoring system of the game Yahtzee. The 'hero' would face off against foes that increased in difficulty in an attempt to slay the strongest enemy, in effect winning the game. The outcome of combat was determined by each party rolling their dice to make a combo from Yahtzee; three of a kind, full house, low/high straight etc, using the ranking of these combos to determine the victor. Before beginning the game the hero was able to choose one of three classes that had a set of unique abilities each. These could be used once per fight to adjust the odds in the player's favour.

These abilities went through several changes as to balance the game so that the hero couldn't just sweep through the levels but also that they held enough strategy that made them valuable. We also introduced a levelling mechanic that made players grow in strength if they defeated key opponents. One last balancing mechanic we introduced was a arbitrary die that had to be used by both parties. The opponents had four dice to make combos with this middle die but the hero had five, having to discard one before their final combo was taken into account. Only Chris was able to get to the final battle and win so the difficulty curve was desirable as he swept through lower levels with ease but once he got to the last three or so fights each one was really intense.