Review: Cubitos - Roll that Beautiful Cube Footage

Cubitos is a 1-4 player game from John D. Clair published by AEG that asks the age old question: do you like rolling dice? How much? Like, a lot? How about deckbuilding? Do you like that? Well, if you answered yes to any of these questions, I need to tell you about this game.

John D. Clair has become known as a “building” designer. Whether you’re building cards (a la Mystic Vale, Custom Hero, or the upcoming Dead Reckoning) or decks, if you’re playing a Clair game, you’ll likely be building something. Cubitos finds players building dice pools in the hopes of rolling movement, currency, or abilities to power their character around a racetrack and across a finish line. Yes, this is a race game where the winner is the first player to cross the finish line on the gameboard. To help your cube-y character scoot around the racetrack, you’ll be buying new dice to add to your pool - each with their own special powers that trigger all kinds of effects. There’s also a strong push-your-luck element as players will have the option to keep rolling their personal dice pool. However, if all the die faces are blank on a roll, the player “busts” and must forfeit their turn.

Do you like stuff? Cubitos has a lot of stuff!

The game makes a mixed first impression. The rulebook is quite confusing at first, the theme/aesthetic of the game could best be described as “bizarre” with a cartoonish cast of cube characters all vying for a gold medal. Gameplay in the first scenario, on the other hand, is very, very fun. Fun to the extent where we launched into the next scenario without giving it a second thought. Everything is light and easy enough to understand (with the exception of the Dugout ability and the dog). We loved the simultaneous dice rolling and hearing from across the table the dismay when someone pushed their luck a little bit too far. It’s exciting! It feels like there’s always something happening. The second scenario blew us away in how different it felt. It was like a totally different game and started to ramp up the complexity. That would prove to be the case with every subsequent campaign scenario. More conditions and rules were added and the game speed slowed considerably.

Everything is light and easy enough to understand.

Instead of casting spells or brewing potions, the Llama Shaman gives you money and military crabs!

Here's where Cubitos runs into issues.

Here’s where Cubitos runs into issues. Sometimes there are multiple abilities or conditions that are triggered on rolls and the game never establishes a clear way to reconcile these. This is further complicated by the fact that abilities, unless otherwise noted, are optional. There are many occasions where players will be faced with a situation where skipping an ability makes sense. But on ability cards that have 3 conditions, how is it resolved? What about cards with three ability boxes that take place in different phases of the game, can you skip one or two without fully skipping all three? It takes a game which presents itself in scenario one as this fun past-paced dice-roller into a hardcore rule negotiation session. Later games found us debating the appendix and feeling like we were house-ruling things like timing. I’m not joking when I say that by the 4th or 5th campaign level, we found ourselves having a separate rules clarification session before each game. I can say with confidence this was not the vision for the game.

A heated race nearing its conclusion. Red is going to roll additional dice due to the game’s built in catch-up mechanics.

Ultimately, It’s a schizophrenic game that, when it’s fun, is outstanding. But when it’s not, feels like you’re doing something very, very wrong. If you’re a fan of Clair’s other work and can put up with a moderate amount of ambiguity there’s fun to be had here.