Rare Kingdom: A story of design and dice

Rare Kingdom is one of the Starcade game designs that has really been a frontrunner for development. It was designed by Kevin Kulp with assistance and testing by the team. Here's Kevin's story about where it all started.

Rare Kingdom started life as another idea. Dollar stores can sometimes be the go to place to find cheap prototyping supplies. And if you have an open mind, a place full of ideas. Over a year ago I kept coming across trick dice in the store, and I became fascinated with the idea of making a game around loaded dice. I found it a good challenge to think of how to use a cheaters die in a game. I would eventually come around to the idea of a bluffing game. Every player would have a bag of dice, 6 to be precise, and scattered among those dice would be 6 loaded dice, loaded on the 6 side. All the dice would be the same color and you have to trade with the other players to get the loaded dice to win. Think you have the loaded dice? Simply roll and prove it. Like many ideas I have it sat for a while.


At Gen Con last month I got to talk to a number of fellow designers and ended up discussing the game with Jason Slingerland. Which made me start considering taking up the game again. Coming back from Gen Con, I had very little time to prepare for the next Starcade Dev Night. Most of the games I had were just not in a state that I was happy with and new ideas were few and far between. So I started revisiting the Loaded Dice game. With little time I realized that the game a major flaw, trading would be difficult in the open. Why would a player give up a 6, if he needed that 6 to win. I knew I needed to change the motivation of the game.

I started by making the goal collecting dice. And what may sound silly, a game about rolling dice you collect which are then used to buy other dice. This grew into having pools of different colored dice, and the same colored dice getting you the same dice. Then a new goal – Collect all the same colored dice and get a prize, a point card. Person with the most points wins. I took this idea to Alex Strang. Alex and I usually meet up before Dev Nights to go over where we are game wise. His first suggestion was to give each colored die an action. I wanted to take it one step at a time.

Over the past year I really felt the need to take a step back and learn design by better observation of other designers. I had the pleasure of seeing the early development of the game Dino Alley (by Jay Treat and Chris Zinsli.) One thing I noticed in that game’s development was a layer by layer approach. Try out some basic mechanics and then add more as you go. I decided for my new game this was the approach I wanted.

That night we tried out the basic version of the game and found while it worked, was lacking and very slow. So to Alex’s suggestion I turned. With the addition of dice actions the game started to shape up. Knowing we had something, Jason Tagmire came into the process and decided to fast track the game for development. 

What started as a quick re-think of an old idea, would now be going into a quick development cycle. The last month, since starting design work, has found the game going through a number of incremental changes to where it stands now. 

I have to say I found this design to be one of the most fulfilling designs I have worked on. I was able to take my observations from the past year and previous lessons learned, applying it to this design. I also found one of the biggest lessons learned from this design has been that of consistency. I have found a lot of my early design decisions that produced gameplay problems were because of a lack of consistency in the design. Once I re-aligned the mechanics to stay in line with each other, game problems seemed to have become much tighter and gameplay has benefited greatly.

Next step polish!