Players: 2-4
Playing Time: 20-45 minutes
Difficulty: 2 (of 10)
The Components
Easy Come, Easy Go comes with:
- 4 dice
- 1 dice cup
- 9 prize tiles
- 1 rulebook
Dice Cup: A small dice cup with faux-leather covering and a purple felt interior. It's got a nice weight to it and is fun to use.
Prize Tiles: 9 prizes, each printed on a large, very solid full-color cardboard tiles. Each tile lists a criteria for winning it (e.g., "3 or less" or "4 of a kind"), and shows a nice picture of a "prize".
Most Out of the Box games feature John Kovalic's unique, cartoon artwork. This is one of the few Out of the Box games to make really good use of it. The artwork is large and looks good. It's also extremely clever, in that all of the aspects of the drawing together show not just a potential "prize" but also directly reflect the winning criteria (e.g., the "4 of a kind" tile shows a picture of 4 BMW convertibles).
Overall, these are probably overproduced, but they look so nice and have such a solid weight that it's OK.
Rulebook: A six page rulebook printed on glossy cardstock. It's easy to follow and has a ton of clear examples.
On the whole, the components in Easy Come, Easy Go are of the highest quality, and quite attractive (primarily thanks to the John Kovalic artwork); they earn a full "5" out of "5" for Style.
The Gameplay
The object of Easy Come, Easy Go is to win (and retain) three fabulous prizes (by rolling the appropriate values).
Setup: The 9 prize tiles are placed in the center of the table. The dice cup, with the 4 dice, is given to the first player.
Rolling the Dice: At the start of your turn you toss the four dice into the cup, and then roll them. You then get a number of chances to reroll the dice, but each time you need to "freeze" at least one more dice then you'd frozen before: this means choosing one or more additional dice that you won't reroll.
So, at best, you could roll that original 4 dice, then reroll 3, then 2, then 1. More likely you'll like, say, 2 of the dice, and thus reroll 2, and then maybe reroll 1 more at the end, if you didn't get what you wanted.
After any roll, you may claim a prize if you qualify, either from the center of the table, or from another player if they'd previously claimed it. If you get to the end of your rolls, have frozen all your dice, and don't win anything, you just pass the dice on without collecting anything.
The Prizes. The prize criteria are all unique combinations of the four dice. They are: 4 of a kind; 2 pair; 3 of a kind and all 4 dice odd; 3 of a kind and all 4 dice even; a sum of exactly 7; a sum of exactly 13; 3 or less; 17 or more; and a straight of 4 consecutive numbers. Remember that you can take the prizes from the center of the table or from another player.
Winning the Game: You win the game if you have 3 of the fabulous prizes at the start of your turn. This means that all of your opponents are going to have a turn to steal them from you.
Relationships to Other Games
Yes, Reiner Knizia did write the book on dice games. It's called Dice Games Properly Explained, and it describes and categorizes a large number of dice games. By Knizia's categories, Easy Come, Easy Go is a non-lucky (because you can reroll) category dice game, meaning that you're trying to organize dice into various sorts of sets (here, 4 of a kind, 3 of a kind all odd, etc).
Any category dice game is inevitably compared to the classic of the genre, Yahtzee. Here's how it compares to Easy Come, Easy Go:
First, Easy Come, Easy Go is slightly less lucky, because you have the opportunity for up to 4 different rolls, rather than just two.
Second, it's a much more social. Yahtzee is essentially multiplayer solitaire, while in Easy Come, Easy Go you're constantly keeping track of what other people are doing, and plotting to steal their prizes.
Finally, Easy Come, Easy Go is a bit less strategic than Yahtzee, just because you have less potential combinations, and very little long-term strategy.
On the other hand, comparing Easy Come, Easy Go to Dancing Dice, a dice game I recently reviewed, Easy Come, Easy Go is similarly social, yet more strategic; I suppose it's in the middle of that strategy spectrum of dice games.
The Game Design
Easy Come, Easy Go is definitely a well-designed & fun dice game. Here's some of the good aspects to its design:
Easy, Quick: The gameplay is very easy to understand & it's also very fast.
Nicely Social: The element of being able to take prizes from other people makes you pay attention to other people's plays, and also causes real interaction.
Good Use of Odds: You can play this game at a simple level, and not worry about any of the odds. However, it's also very easy to concentrate just a little bit and figure out odds for what type of results you'd need if you rerolled certain dice (e.g., "if I reroll just my '3', I could get 2 pairs by rolling a '4' or I could get three of a kind, all even by rolling a '2', so I'd have a 1/3 chance; conversely ..."). The various prize results have been very well choosen, so that there's no overlap between them, but they're very complementary, and a single die roll could often complete multiple prize results, depending on which comes down. (There's also some odds work you could do to figure out which prizes are "safer" because they're harder to roll, but that's probably a bit less important, and also beyond what's really needed.)
Nice Brinkmanship: There's also some nice ability for brinkmanship in deciding whether to take a prize from a leading player or not. You might have a better chance of taking a prize from someone other than the leader, but then the leader might win. (One of my marks that Easy Come, Easy Go was a good game was the fact that we discussed a final, brinkmanship decision which had failed for about 5 or 10 minutes after the game had ended.)
All you can really say bad about Easy Come, Easy Go is that it's a pretty simple game. Still, I do believe that there's enough grist to satisfy a lot of different types of gamers. On the whole I give it a "4" out of "5" for Substance.
Conclusion
Easy Come, Easy Go, by Reiner Knizia, is a simple, family-oriented dice game. It's very well designed, it has some strategic & probabilistic complexity, and it allows for very social gameplay. I unreservedly recommend it for family play, and think that a lot of other gamers might enjoy it as a light filler.
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