Review Summary: It is easier to build a city when you know what you should be striving for.

Blurb from the publisher: 'The Queen is taking a personal interest in the development of your cities. The type of locations you construct, where you build them, and even your capacity to gather resources or build armies may all come under her scrutiny. Trade is also high on the royal priorities, and your ability to interact with trade towns and villages will add to the effectiveness of your strategies. Of course the supply to trade ships will still need to flow, and those bandits have not gone away! Winning the prize, and becoming the next great capital just got more interesting, exciting, and challenging!

By Royal Decree comes with a new and separate trade board, extra dice for that board, and new strategies with Queen's Plans cards. New locations require you to be very specific about when you use them. Victory is in your grasp if you can just roll, build, and win!'

What you get: Your EUR 24,99 or equivalent will buy you Dice City: BY Royal Decree, the third and final expansion for the Dice City game line that started with Dice City, the dice-crafting game that accommodates one to four players in around 45 minutes. In addition to the small, Α6 size 12-page English rulebook which can be downloaded from the company's website free of charge, the game also contains the following: 39 Location cards, 18 Queen's Plans cards, 12 Army Strength tokens, one double-sided board, and 4 green six-sided dice.

Gameplay: The first new rule introduces buildings that can perform at very specific points during the turn. Most of the buildings in this expansion have an attribute called Presence. This equals the number of dice in a city, after removing the die from that card to use its ability. If one has that exact number of dice, only then can he use that ability.

The Queen's Plans cards are incentives for players to build what the queen desires. At the beginning of the game each player secretly receives three plans. Examples include building a 2 x 2 formation of 4 non-harvest locations of the same type, building five military locations, building six trade locations etc. Fulfilled plans give out 2, 3 or 5 points. Each player keeps one plan secret for himself, places one open on the area for the communal plans (which eventually equal the number of players), and discards the remaining one. Once a communal plan is fulfilled, the player claims it and keeps it with the rest of his points.

The Trade Board depicts a trading village and a trading town, each with different types of locations. At the beginning of the game the players choose which side will be used. On a player's turn a player rolls the green trade die, a colour that did not exist previously, and places it on the resulting location on his own dedicated spot. This particular die can be used in three ways which differ from the standard usage of the dice found on the players' boards. First, by resolving its ability after placing a resource token (irrespective of type, i.e. wood, stone, iron, or even army strength) from the stock to the location. Secondly, the die can be moved, by again paying like in the first case. Finally, the die may be removed in order to collect all the stock that the location that hosted it had accumulated.

The rulebook also includes suggested set ups for a variety of configurations with the other expansions, as well as a 17-question FAQ.

The strong points: Dice City could be daunting for beginners, since the abundance of cards and options made it harder for new players to decide what paths to take. Not any longer. The Queen's Plans are a nice guide that, should one wish to follow it, will help him rake points faster and more efficiently. As a side effect, the Queen's Plans also improve the game's replayability and novelty. Nobody has control over dice rolls, yet psychologically the game feels less scripted with a different starting point each time. The plans are overall balanced, with some shorter terms goals like 'build 2 non-harvest locations in the same turn', to some longer term ones like 'build two locations of each of the four types'. Obviously, these two cards do not offer the same rewards. Be quick on the short term common plans and leave your personal, hidden card for last. Nobody can claim it from you, but if the communal plans ran out, you will find yourself doing the exact same thing for no extra reward.

I enjoyed the board with the trading village / trading town. The village is really basic to be fair, and will be used by non-experienced players while still learning the ropes. The trading town on the other hand is more complex and intriguing with its Mint, Fountain, Blacksmith, Grand manor, Regular Army, and Church. The mechanics for the exchange of resources are clever, as is the abstraction of the village/town trading items back to you. This board helps the game's rhythm and ensures that nobody will be left behind due to bad rolls, providing even more options to a game that already had many of them.

The rule about Presence is brilliant. Where before one could activate his buildings in an optimal order, here one needs to activate some of them at very particular times. The Flea Market will invariably be one of the first buildings to be played. The Alchemist will always be your last one. This creates a whole new mindset, and makes Dice City even more of a thinking man's game. It is harder to create combos, since each building with Presence that you add on your city makes your dice rolls harder to manage until you reach what you consider optimal usage. Yet, these buildings should not be brushed away. Taking the Flea Market as an example, receiving two resources instead of one is not something that you wish to pass on.

I enjoyed the set ups, and not just because they make a veteran's life easier. This is no mere repetition of the setups from the previous expansions. The game gains even more on replayability and variability, with many different starting points and options. One can use them as suggestions in order to create his own. The Epic Set Up (one of each location cards from every single expansion and the basic box) is a recipe for a game that will be as epic as it is unbalanced. After all, if one player gets a location, no other player can get the same location. This however does not mean that the ensuing game is not enjoyable.

The rulebook is well-written and easy to understand. If you know the basic game, you can incorporate the expansion in it within less than a minute. The FAQ is useful, even though, to be frank, I felt that it provides sort of obvious answers.

Once again, the art is very cute and fully in line with the basic game. Even though they are small (69 x 44 mm) the cards are colourful and rather easy to read. All artwork looks computer generated in a style reminiscent of young adolescents' console games. It might not be as unexpected as I found it when first playtesting the basic game, it however works.

Even after sleeving all the cards, every piece of this expansion fits in the box of the basic game, along with every other expansion. Hallelujah! A publisher is respectful of gamer space, and the need to keep everything in the same box.

The weak points: There is a certain pointlessness in the abundance of expansions for Dice City. The two different elements of By Royal Decree (the Queen's Plans and the Trade Board) could have been easily included in the basic game. Even more so, because they address themselves to less experienced players than to more experienced ones. Having playtested the game and all its expansions, I feel that they should have been bundled differently, at a maximum of one expansion for the whole thing, if not none (i.e. everything should have been included in the basic game).

None of the issues I mentioned in the review of the basic game is addressed. Interaction levels between players remain the same, and the aesthetics continue to be counterintuitive, practically working against interaction. The communal Queen's Plans are cool, yet they do not particularly increase player interaction. The trading post requires a bit of more careful calculation, yet this exacerbates the problem of the game being a multiplayer solitaire; good luck trying to sort out what not to play, so that the next player will not benefit more than you through strong starting position. Unless you stall the game to unfathomable levels, this is simply not going to happen.

You needed a lot of space to play Dice City; now you will need a few square centimeters more.

I might be looking at the wrong spot, but once you mix the cards of the expansion with the basic game, you won't be able to distinguish where each card came from. Would it have been so hard to put an small emblem on each card to distinguish its expansions, like every other game does? Even without such an emblem though, shouldn't the list of each expansion's buildings exist somewhere for ease of reference? I can't locate it anywhere.

Conclusion: By Royal Decree is an expansion that adds to Dice City, especially for less experienced players. Having a building guide of sorts in order to accumulate the points faster, while also gaining access to a common board which increases the game's internal speed made me appreciate the initial design even more. If you own Dice City already, it is strongly recommended.

For more info on Dice City: By Royal Decree, Artipia Games and Alderac Entertainment Group visit their respective websites at http://www.artipiagames.com and http://www.alderac.com/.

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