Dice Bloodline (2024)

Blood and birth. Love and death. The relentless, callous march of time. New branches on the family tree bud and wither in a blink of an eye. The whims of chance devour the weak and unlucky until all that remains are the barest fragments of history in Dice Bloodline. Dice Bloodline is a one-player dice game of creating a multi-generation family tree. You begin with a lone ancestor, quickly looking to preserve a legacy across over a hundred years of history through marriage, childbirth, and avoiding calamities like…well…like the plague. You are at the whim of the dice, but you are not helpless in directing your future. Each turn allows you to choose how the dice score from a table of twelve options (familiar to anyone who has played a “Yacht-family” dice game). With this, you select the shape into which your family tree will branch. This is a “Make-as-You-Play” game, which means that the game starts with no more than a sheet of paper, a pencil, and some dice. The rules provide all the guidance you need for adding new members to your family tree through marriage and childbirth, which makes every game of Dice Bloodline an evolving, unique experience. You may even find opportunities to grow new trees from leaves of ones you created previously, leading to a complex web of ancestry and interlocking families over vast stretches of time. —description from the designer