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Dancing Dice is a new dice-throwing game by Silvano Serrentino over at daVinci Games (published & distributed in the US by Mayfair Games, as with the rest of daVinci's line).
Players: 2-6
Playing Time: 20-45 minutes
Difficulty: 1 (of 10)
The Components
 Dancing Dice comes with:
- 39 dice
- 1 board
- 6 performance cubes
- 6 endurance discs
- 6 player screens
- 1 rulebook
Dice: The dice in Dancing Dice are unique and interesting--a good start for a dice game. They're all very solid plastic dice with indented & inked icons on them; instead of pips, we actually have fotosteps--between 1 and 6 on each die. They're a little busier than normal dice as a result, but still easy to read.
36 of the dice are player dice, 6 in each player color (brown, black, green, purple, red, blue, brown). In each player set you get 3 colored dice with white icons and 3 white dice with colored icons.
The player dice are also color-matched to the wooden discs & cubes that we'll meet in a second. Most of the matching is pretty good, but unfortunately the purple player gets pink dice, which are really closer to red than purple. I actually tried using the purple, and eventually switched out for another color due to the confusion.
The last three dice are the famed Tango dice, which are beige in color and have different colored icons on each side, but are otherwise identical to the player dice.
Overall, the dice are pretty and evocative.
Board: The gameboard is a very nicely produced heavy cardboard sheet. It's generally colorful & attractive. It ranks all 19 potential dances, gives a space to put your Tango dice, and also provides an 11-space endurance track for measuring exhaustion. There's nothing fancy here, but it's a good central focus for the game.
Wood Bits: Each player gets an "endurance disc" and a "performance cube" in his color. They're small wood bits. The brown & purple colors are a little too close in color, both being very dark. I personally would have exchanged some light color for one of them. (Say, pink for the purple, and then it would have matched the dice too.)
Player Screens: Thin cardboard screens in each of the six player colors. Each one has a bunch of iconic info on it to help players play the game, including: a listing of the dance types in order; a reminder on how ties are broken; a reminder of what Rock and Gala are, and what their benefits are; and a reminder of how many players lose endurance at any point.
The main purpose of the player screens is to hide the dice, and they were a little small for that, but did OK; all of the rules on the screens were a very nice bonus.
Rulebook: A black & white rulebook printed in 4 languages (English, Italian, German, and French). It had a lengthy example and some illos, and was generally easy to play.
It's worth mentioning the theme here. Theoretically you're coaching dancers and trying to get them to perform the best steps, and thus avoid exhaustion in a dance marathon. It sounds a bit silly, but the theme is actually well-applied and really adds something to the game.
Overall, Dancing Dice has very high quality components. I didn't find it spectacularly beautiful, but I did think it was about as beautiful as you could expect a dice game to be. Combine that with some really good utility design, and only a singular complaint (the color purple), and this games ekes in a "5" out of "5" for Style: excellent.
The Gameplay
The object of Dancing Dice is to dance all the best steps to win a dance marathon.
Setup: Each player is given a set of 6 dancing dice, a player screen, a performance cube, and an endurance disc. The endurance discs are all placed on the game board at 10.
The three Tango dice are rolled and placed on the board to show the initial Tango (a group of three numbers, e.g., "1-3-6" or "2-5-5").
Order of Play: Each turn the players take the following actions together:
- Roll Dice
- Form Dances
- Judge Dances
Roll Dice: Each player rolls his 6 dancing dice behind his screen. He may then choose any number of them to reroll, and do so.
Form Dances: Each player then forms his 6 dice into two dances of 3 dice each (still secretly, and behind his screen). Clearly, a player has to choose between forming a good dance and a bad dance, averaging out his dances, or doing something else in this stage, which has some tactical possibilities.
When you form your dances you put one dance in front of the other so that you have a "first dance" and a "second dance".
 The Ranked Dances. There 19 ranked dances. They are (in order): Boogie (1-1-1); Tap Dance (2-2-2); Cha Cha Cha (3-3-3); Tango (the current set of Tango Dance); Mambo (a sum of at least 18 on the 3 dice); and 14 other dances, from the Twist (at least 17) to the Macarena (at least 4). (Yep, that's right, the Macarena is the worst dance possible.)
There's also one other distinction in dances; each player has three colored dice and three white dice. If a dance is made up of all the same type of die, it's considered pure, which breaks ties.
The Dance Combos. There are two special dance combos, which are a combination of both dances (and thus all 6 dice). The first is the "Rock" which is when you have a pair of exactly matching dances (for example, a 1-3-5 and a 1-3-5 which would be be two Salsas); and the second is the "Gala" which is 6 of a kind (for example, a 4-4-4 and a 4-4-4, which would be two Two Steps). Each of these special dances protects from endurance loss, as noted below.
Judge Dances: Now all players remove their player screens to reveal their dances. First all the first dances are compared, then all the second dances.
Each player puts his performance cube on the game board to indicate his current dance. The players in the top half of the ranked results (rounded down) have mastered the floor for this dance; the other players, meanwhile, are a bit more tired. Each one loses one point of endurance. Then the second dance is judged similarly.
However, if a player managed to form a Rock or Gala combination, he loses no endurance, even if his dance steps would usually require it. In addition, if a player managed a Gala, he actually gets two endurance back!
Ending the Game: Players drop out of the competition as they reach 0 endurance, slowly decreasing the size of the playing field. When there's just one player left, his dancers have won the competition!
Relationships to Other Games
Any dice game is inevitably compared to Yahtzee (1956), the classic in the field. Like Yahtzee, Dancing Dice (2004) is a roll-reroll-match-and-score game (or as Reiner Knizia calls it in his Dice Games Properly Explained a "category" dice game). In each case you're trying to set yourself up to make a certain type of sequence.
On the whole, Dancing Dice is a fair amount less strategic than Yahtzee. Here you have fairly limited matches that you can make (basically, you go for high numbers, or the 1-, 2-, or 3- pairs, or the Tango, or a Rock), and just two small tactical decisions: how you divide your dice; and which order you put your dances in. Conversely Yahtzee allows you to choose between a lot of different types of matches and also to choose which matches to fill in from a set of dice that could yield multiple returns.
On the other hand, Dancing Dice is a fair amount more social than Yahtzee. The older game often feels like multiplayer solitaire, while in Dancing Dice you really feel like you're in competition with the other players, and can revel in their poor dance steps and cringe at their good ones.
Obviously, Dancing Dice is a bit simpler than Yahtzee too.
Also see Chekov (2003) for an even simpler roll-match-and-score dice game, though one with a unique scoring system.
The Game Design
Dancing Dice is undoubtedly a light dice game intended for family play. Given that genre, it works quite well. Play is fast and simple but also allows for real (if light) strategic choices (both in what you're going to reroll and how to organize your dances). The social aspects are also very well done, giving you real feelings of anticipating and competition (in fact, this is what makes the game).
My only real complaint for an otherwise solid game is that the end game can slow down; with the opportunity for multiple player elimination, you can have quite a few people waiting on the sidelines as the last two opponents dice again and again.
I give it a Substance rating of "4" out of "5" in its genre.
Conclusion
Dancing Dice is a well-produced & enjoyable entrant into the "family dice game genre". Though less strategic that classic Yahtzee it allows for a lot of interaction and socialization absent from the former game. In addition, the theming works surpisingly well! Definitely recommended for family and light play.
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