Divvy Dice Review

Ah, roll-and-write games. It seems like everyone and their grandmother is coming out with their own take on Yahtzee, that classic game of rolling dice and writing down your score. Divvy Dice is one such take, and it stands out—if for no other reason than its weird design.

Divvy Dice clearly follows in the footsteps of That's Pretty Clever!, the massively popular 2018 game that blew the hinges on the roll-and-write genre with nothing more than six different colored dice and a scoring sheet. Divvy Dice only has five colored dice, and it trades out the scoring sheet for plastic cards that you fill out in a bingo-esque manner.

My opinions on this game are all over the place, but allow me to share them with you. Here's my experience with Divvy Dice and everything you need to know to decide if you'll like this game or not.

This review is based on my own personal copy of Divvy Dice, which I bought used from BGG's GeekMarket. Not a free review copy.

In this review:

• Overview
• Setup and Table Footprint
• Learning Curve
• Game Experience
  • Decision Space
  • Luck Factor
  • Pacing
  • Fun Factor
  • Player Interaction
  • Player Counts
• Replayability
• Solo Mode
• Production Quality
• The Bottom Line

Overview

The core concept of Divvy Dice is familiar: you roll and reroll a set of dice (a la Yahtzee) and manipulate the results to score fast and end up with more points than everyone else. The twist here is that whenever you reroll, all other players get to benefit from the dice you've chosen to reroll.

Fun fact: Divvy Dice was originally a German game called Man muss auch gönnen können, which roughly translates to "You have to also grant others something." That's quite the mouthful!

In Divvy Dice, your goal is to build a 3x3 grid of cards in front of you. The cards come in two types: Scoring Cards (which give you points) and Bonus Cards (which give you ways to manipulate dice results). Both card types have some pattern of dice numbers on them, which you need to fill out and complete in order to score or unlock cards.

On your turn, you roll the five colored dice—Blue, Green, Yellow, Pink, and Orange—and choose which ones to keep and which ones to reroll. You can reroll up to two times, allowing you multiple chances to get the dice you need to mark your cards. But whenever you reroll, everyone else gets to pick one of the to-be-rerolled dice and mark that die on their cards.

So why reroll at all? Because there's a catch: in Divvy Dice, when you're the active player, you can only use your rolled dice to mark cards if you're able to fully complete a card. In other words, if you have a card that still needs 3, 4, 5, 6 but you roll 2, 2, 2, 3, 4, you can't mark that card at all. The 3 and 4 go to waste because you didn't also roll a 5 and 6. It's all or nothing in Divvy Dice. Otherwise, to make partial progress on your cards, you'll need to get free dice marks when other players reroll their dice.

What happens if you reroll two times and can't do anything with your dice results? Divvy Dice offers you something called a Chance: you can either draw blind from the top of the card market deck (and either keep it or discard it) or you can choose to use two of the five dice on your cards. This is the only other way to make partial progress on your cards.

Why are you marking cards, anyway? Well, when you completely fill a Scoring Card, it becomes eligible to score. Different Scoring Cards have different scoring criteria. One might give you points for adjacent cards of a certain type, while another might give points for each column of completed cards in your grid. Incomplete Scoring Cards do nothing for you; the more completed Scoring Cards in your grid, the more points you can score.

But Scoring Cards aren't easy to complete, which is where Bonus Cards come into play. When you completely fill a Bonus Card, it grants you a special ability that you can use three times. One might let you change the number of a die, while another might let you choose an extra die when someone rerolls, while another might let you treat a die as a different color. Bonus Cards help you complete your cards faster—but they also take up space in your grid, reducing the number of Scoring Cards you can have. You only have nine spots in a 3x3 grid, after all.

How do you get more cards in your grid? By buying them from the central market. To buy a card, you have to roll either three-of-a-kind or four-of-a-kind depending on where the card sits in the market. Your dice are used to either buy cards or mark cards, NOT both.

As soon as someone acquires their ninth card for their 3x3 grid, the game end triggers. Everyone else gets one more turn, then everyone gets one final turn after that. Tally up scores and whoever has the most wins!

Setup and Table Footprint

Divvy Dice is easy and quick to set up. You shuffle the Scoring Cards into their own deck, shuffle the Bonus Cards into their own deck, then deal two of each to every player. Flip over four cards of each type to create the card market. And you're done! It takes about 3 to 4 minutes.

As for table footprint, Divvy Dice is small enough to play on most tables. The card market isn't very big, and the only other space requirement is that each player has enough room for their own 3x3 grid. Add a little bit of space for rolling the dice (or just pass the box around) and that's it.

Learning Curve

Divvy Dice is an amalgam of several different mechanisms, where each one isn't a big deal on its own but the overall package is a bit more complex than the box might have you believe.

Dice rolling and rerolling are easy enough to grasp, and using those dice to mark cards is equally simple. Getting free dice picks when other players reroll? Easy, but adds another layer. Not being able to use your own dice unless you can complete a card with them? Now you're creeping into "Huh?" territory if you're playing with non-gamers.

The way the card market works—expensive cards may or may not get cheaper over time—adds another layer of complexity, and the Chance rule that kicks in after you reroll twice adds yet another layer. And then you have to explain the different Scoring Card criteria and how the Bonus Cards work.

This isn't Yahtzee, Farkle, or Qwixx. Divvy Dice is a non-trivial step up from those games, and it might be too much for anyone who's expecting something more in line with those classics.

Game Experience

Decision Space

Given the mish-mash of mechanisms in Divvy Dice, it should be no surprise to hear that it's packed with decisions. But the decisions, on their own, are quite minor—it's the sum of all those decisions that influences whether you're more or less likely to win. Put another way, Divvy Dice is about consistency, about making a long string of small but smart decisions that massage the odds in your favor so you're more likely to come out ahead.

Here are some examples of decisions that are running through my head during a game of Divvy Dice:

• Should I reroll the Yellow 6 even though I know my opponent needs that exact die to complete a card? Or do I keep it despite not needing it?
• I rolled a Blue 5 and Pink 5. Should I reroll the other dice and try to get four-of-a-kind to buy that card that's perfect for my grid?
• Is it better to rush completion of my big Scoring Card and guarantee those points for the end, or do I rush buying more cards so I have more flexibility when choosing from the dice rerolled by my opponents?
• What kind of balance do I want between Scoring Cards and Bonus Cards?
• My opponent is rerolling a Green 3, Pink 5, and Orange 6. Do I take the Green 3 that fits perfectly into one card, or the Orange 6 that fits perfectly into another card? Should I use my Bonus Card action now to take both dice, or do I want to save that for later?
• I need more cards but none of the ones in the market synergize with my grid. Should I intentionally reroll twice and bust so I can blind draw? Is that worth giving my opponents two free dice picks?
• I've been waiting on Orange cards all game to satisfy my big Scoring Card's criteria, and one finally showed up in the market... but it's difficult to complete and doesn't offer me anything useful. Do I take it anyway? Or do I wait around some more, hoping another one shows up?
• When taking dice picks from opponents' rerolls, do I shove them all onto one card and sprint for completion, which limits my options on which dice I can take in the future? Or should I spread them out across multiple cards to keep my options open, ensuring I can always take a die?

This is just scratching the surface. As you can see, there's a lot to process during Divvy Dice, and a lot of it involves uncertainty. It's the kind of game where you can math out all the probabilities, figure out the expected value of every move, and lean into that. But there's also an extra layer on top of that, a unique blend of strategic and tactical choices that mix odds management with points efficiency.

This also means, unfortunately, that Divvy Dice is prone to analysis paralysis. On the one hand, you'll have players who will absolutely want to crunch through all the odds and possibilities in their heads, which isn't easy here. And then you'll have players who are overwhelmed by Divvy Dice's deceptive complexity, stuck between decisions because it's never quite clear what a "good" or "bad" decision is.

Luck Factor

There's a good amount of luck here. I mean, what'd you expect when "dice" is literally in its name? But the luck factor in Divvy Dice comes down to more than just the dice. It's a double whammy.

The big thing is that you're at the mercy of the card market. After all, the entire goal of Divvy Dice is building your 3x3 grid in a way that scores the most points, and you do that by acquiring some mixture of Scoring Cards and Bonus Cards that complement each other. But if the right cards never show up in the market, you're boned.

There's nothing you can do about it. If you don't like the cards in the market, your only other option is to blind draw—and that's just as dependent on luck. Sure, you can discard any blindly drawn card so it doesn't harm your grid, but then you've just wasted a turn. And it's not like you can just pivot mid-game and start going after different Scoring Cards because whatever you have in your grid is there for good and will clash with whatever new strategy you try to adopt.

The other big thing is that, of course, you're at the mercy of the dice. If you have several cards that all need multiple 6s in various colors, and if those 6s never roll, then you're boned. If you've run out of cards to fill in your grid and you need to buy from the card market but can't roll any three-of-a-kinds or four-of-a-kinds, you're boned. If you keep rolling for high-probability results yet they never land, you're boned.

Fortunately, there's some luck mitigation here. For example, most Bonus Cards let you manipulate dice results, and that certainly helps when you're unlucky—if you're able to get those cards. (Again, not only do they need to show up in the card market, but you need to roll a set that lets you buy it.) You can also mitigate the I-can't-assign-dice-to-my-cards issue by spreading out your dice assignments so that you always have a wide range of possible dice spots that can be filled.

But at the end of the day, Divvy Dice is lucky. I'd say it's about 50/50 on luck versus strategy. The player who makes the better decisions will probably win more often over time, but a well-timed lucky roll or a string of unlucky rolls can seriously swing big.

Pacing

The box for Divvy Dice is a big, fat liar. It says it should only take about 30 minutes to play. And while I can be forgiving of a box-reported play time that's somewhat off the mark, this one's just flat-out wrong. Whether you're playing with two or six players, it takes about an hour.

Fortunately, the game arc isn't so bad across that hour. You start with only a few cards in your grid, so at the beginning you're mainly focused on rolling well (to either mark off cards or acquire more cards). But as your grid grows, your dice placement options also grow, increasing your decision space. And once you have completed Bonus Cards, you even get those special actions that further expand what you can do.

Then, at some point, you begin to feel the race aspect emerge—when you think you're in the lead, you want to rush the end as quickly as you can, but the tension also rears its head when someone else is clearly rushing the end and you aren't ready for it.

In short, Divvy Dice is long for what it is but has very little downtime because you're engaged on everyone's turns. It ramps up from start to finish, and then you spend a few minutes scoring.

Fun Factor

Divvy Dice is a weird concoction of thinky, lucky, and chaotic. While nothing is ever fully in your control, you have enough tools at your disposal to shape the odds and meaningfully carve out a path to success. Yet at the same time, a bad string of luck can quickly derail any lead you might have.

If you were to ask me whether Divvy Dice is fun, I don't think I could say it is. Sure, it's mentally engaging with all the interwoven mechanisms, and it evokes that primitive sort of excitement that comes from rolling dice and filling out cards bingo-style. But at the end of the day, it feels a little... pointless? As if the juice isn't worth the squeeze.

I guess my problem is that, when I win, it isn't clear whether I won because I played better than everyone else or because I had fortune's favor. Maybe I made all kinds of poor decisions but lucked out in the end. Meanwhile, maybe my opponent made all the optimal decisions but the odds just didn't play out to their benefit. The trouble is, I don't know.

And that isn't always a bad thing. I have nothing against luck in games. But for a game like Divvy Dice, one that's really quite thinky for a dice game, that just doesn't fly with me. If I'm spending an hour min-maxing my odds from multiple angles, I want to know that it matters.

Player Interaction

There isn't much player interaction in Divvy Dice, but you're certainly involved and engaged on everyone's turn. After all, you're getting free dice picks whenever they reroll—and they're rerolling all the time—so it feels like their decisions are causing you to benefit and make progress.

There can also be some indirect player interaction in the card market if players are buying cards to deny them to others. But given how important it is to build a grid of cards that synergize, it's foolish to hate draft in this game and no one really does that in practice.

For the most part, you're just working on your own tableau and racing against everyone else to finish with the most points.

Player Counts

Divvy Dice is basically the same at all player counts, but some of the dynamics do change with more or less players.

For example, with two players, the card market can crawl to a stop if neither of you want to buy any of the cards. There's no way to wipe the market, so it's either a game of chicken (who's going to blink and be the first to buy an undesirable card?) or a game of chance (both players end up blind drawing for the rest of the game). With more players, this is less likely to happen.

More importantly, the card market has a faster turnover rate with more players and you're going to see a wider variety of cards over the course of the game. This increased exposure helps you come across more cards that fit well in your grid, but you also have to wait longer between turns, which increases the risk of someone else picking up the cards you want.

Divvy Dice scales pretty well as far as game time because you're getting free dice picks from everyone, so everyone's always progressing. But with more players, you end up with more free dice picks between your turns—and that means it feels like less of a "waste" to burn a turn just to buy a card from the market. There's a shift in balance between rolling to mark cards and rolling to buy cards. Not a super huge one, but it's there.

And there's also slightly more tension with more players, especially when someone starts racing to finish their grid and you feel behind. In a two-player game, you can take your time and relax until your opponent gets their eighth card; in a six-player game, you can't let up at all or else you risk falling behind with only five or six cards as someone buys their ninth.

Overall, Divvy Dice is more tense and chaotic at higher player counts, more thoughtful and restrained at lower player counts. If you're looking for a sweet spot, I'd say it plays best at three players.

Replayability

While Divvy Dice is enjoyable in the moment, the shine doesn't last once it's packed up and put away. I'm not saying it's bad, and I'm not saying I've ever regretted playing a game of it, but I don't quite want to play it, either. (I explained my reasons for this in the "Fun Factor" section above.) So, in that sense, Divvy Dice doesn't inspire replayability in me.

But when it does come out to play, it has enough variability and interesting decisions in it to keep me engaged, entertained, and feeling like I'm actually playing a game and not just mindlessly chucking dice. There are different strategies you can pursue, and you're regularly forced to re-evaluate your situation and make tactical audibles depending on how the dice roll and how the card market changes. It isn't boring, not at all.

All that being said, Divvy Dice falls in a weird place—a bit too long for what it is, a bit too lucky for how thinky and strategic it wants to be, a bit too clunky with its hodgepodge of mechanisms. When I'm looking to commit an hour to a game, I want more meat than what Divvy Dice provides; when I just want dice-rolling bingo-style fun, I'd prefer to play something that's much simpler and in the 30-minutes range.

Solo Mode

I don't hate the solo mode in Divvy Dice. It has minimal rule changes, so if you like the core gameplay, you'll probably like the solo mode as well.

On your active turn, everything is exactly the same. On your passive turn, you roll the dice and get to choose a number of dice depending on how many times you rerolled on your previous active turn: choose 3 dice if you rerolled 0 times; 2 dice if you rerolled 1 time; 1 die if you rerolled 2 times. You still have to be smart about your rerolls.

At the end your passive turn, the right-most card in the market gets discarded—your choice between the Scoring Card or Bonus Card—and these discarded cards are used to track how many rounds you've played. In the solo mode, your goal is to reach some number of points within some number of rounds, determined by the difficulty level.

I definitely like that it plays fast. When playing solo, Divvy Dice only takes about 30 minutes, give or take. (No surprise since you're the only one making decisions, plus the fixed number of rounds.) I also like that there's minimal rules overhead, no extra dummy player, no automa, etc. All of it's still subject to the same quirks and problems in the "real" game, though, and the non-trivial luck factor means you can play well and still lose.

Production Quality

Divvy Dice's production is purely functional. There's nothing to write home about and it lacks both identity and personality. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it does hurt the sense of value you get from it.

For starters, Divvy Dice is themeless. It fits in with all the earlier roll-and-writes like Farkle, Qwixx, Rolling America, and That's Pretty Clever with it being completely abstract. Apart from the dice being colored, there's nothing special about them. You're just filling numbers on paper. While not all games need tons of theme, it does make Divvy Dice forgettable.

That being said, I do like the wooden dice. They're lightweight with a good size, and they have edges that are just slightly rounded enough to make for satisfying rolls without veering off the table.

I like the use of plastic cards and dry erase markers, and they're okay in quality. The ink doesn't always erase so easily, though, and the markers don't have eraser tops so you'll need to provide your own erasers, whether that's tissues, cotton balls, or whatever else.

My one big usability complaint is that the iconography in Divvy Dice leaves a lot to be desired. In my first few games, I was constantly referencing the icon guide because a lot of them just aren't intuitive. And after taking a year-long break and returning to the game, I had to learn them all over again. I appreciate the language-independence, but I wish they were less confusing.

Divvy Dice comes in a reasonably small box, but it could honestly be even smaller. The insert is a bit weird because it contains that cardboard platform where you place the dice you want to keep on your turn, and that platform is totally unnecessary—it adds nothing and makes the box bigger. Divvy Dice could've been pocket-sized, and I might've liked it more then.

The Bottom Line

In a vacuum, Divvy Dice isn't bad. It's even enjoyable. But I don't find myself going back to it and I have a hard time figuring out the right audience for it. It's too thinky for casual gamers, too lucky for strategic gamers, too long for what it is, without enough personality to smooth over its rough edges.

Ultimately, while I wouldn't mind playing it, there are better alternatives out there that I'd rather play instead.

Buy it from:
Amazon • Noble Knight Games

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