Yu-Gi-Oh! Early Days Collection: Dungeon Dice Monsters

Most Yu-Gi-Oh! games are all about the franchise’s card game. Those began appearing early in the manga’s pages, and it only took a few books before the story shifted to focus on tournaments. However, before those, the manga had several tomes in which Yugi’s alter ego played various games, against many opponents. The early days were DARK; Yugi’s first Shadow Game had someone almost stab themselves for a game about picking up bills with a knife. In another, he burned a criminal to death.

As far as game tables go, I think those in the manga (for
Duelist Kingdom and Dungeon Dice Monsters) make more
sense than the giant arenas from the anime.

Then, there was Duel Kingdom. Shortly afterwards, there was Battle City, which ended up with rules much closer to the real card game. However, between the two, a short arc introduced another game of Kazuki Takahashi’s making: Dungeon Dice Monsters (shortened DDM). Created by Duke Devlin (Ryuji Otogi in the original Japanese), an aspiring game maker whose family sets up shop near Yugi’s home, the game features monsters appearing when dice are deployed on a field. I will explain much more in due time.

These odds are looking good!

There was also a whole thing about a disfigured man in a clown mask, an intense desire for revenge, and arson, but that’s because the manga has always been ballsier than the anime.

Dungeon Dice Monsters was eventually adapted into a physical board game. It never quite caught on, probably due to the complexity of the system that demanded a full board to play as well as the associated dice – not quite as simple as just playing with cards! It also got an adaptation on the Game Boy Advance, released in North America on February 11th, 2003 (though it came out two years earlier in Japan), and a rerelease in the Early Days Collection.

What IS Dungeon Dice Monsters Anyway?

Try not to get yourself cornered.

I’ll open by explaining the game, its rules, and its mechanics. As the name indicates, this game trades cards for dice. The board is made of 13X19 squares, with players on opposite sides. Each player has a pool of 15 dice, which will be the ones they roll. Each player has a figurine named the Die Master in front of them; this figurine starts with three hit points.

Dice sides are called Crests. There are six different  types: Summon, Movement, Attack, Defense, Spell and Trap. Every die has a different selection of these Crests – as an example, a die may have one or two Attack Crests, or maybe none! The only Crest guaranteed to be on every die is the Summon type. Dice have levels ranging from 1 to 4, and the lower the level is, the more Summon Crests it will have.

Purdy.

At the start of your turn, you select three of your available dice and roll them. All non-Summon Crests rolled will be added to you Crest Pool, and you will be able to use these depending on which actions you want to take during a turn. However, to start building your “Dungeon”, you will need to roll two Summon Crests of the same level. That’s why lower-level dice have more crests; they are easier to bring out. It takes much more luck to bring out higher-level monsters, but on the other hand it does increase the chance that you’ll get new Crests for your pool.

I'm so thankful for the Early Days Collection including each
game's instruction manual!

Starting the long trek across the board.

However, you do need to summon monsters, since you build your Dungeon using their dice. When you roll two or three same-level Summon Crests, you pick one of those dice and unfold it on the field, a process called a “Dimension”. This makes the creature appear on the square on which the die was placed. Dice can unfold in many patterns and be rotated left or right, but every new unfolded die must touch your Die Master’s tile, or any other tile from your Dungeon. Dice used for summons cannot be rolled again. You are limited to 10 Dimensions per match, which would leave you with 5 dice to roll for Crests.

Now, I gotta att- what do you mean, I don't have Attack Crests?

Create a path that links your Dungeon to your opponent’s. Make your monsters walk to the other side using Movement Crests, and attack the opposing Die Master using Attack Crests. Monsters can battle each other on the way, and have HP, ATK and DEF stats. A monster whose HP is depleted is destroyed. Monsters summoned to the field can have special effects; some effects are instant upon summon, while others may be activated repeatedly at the cost of specific Crests.

Will admit though, with models for all the monsters, the
battle mode is fun to watch... when you're not caught fighting
an opponent that can defend against all your attacks.

Monsters have one of five Types, with (again!) a rock-paper-scissors system that makes each Type strong against one and weak against another, but not to the point of a monster instantly destroying a monster of a Type weaker to its own. They can come in three varieties: Walking, Flying, and Tunneling. Flying monsters can only be attacked by other Flying monsters or others that can attack them, but to compensate, they need to spend two Movement Crests to move one space. Tunneling monsters, at the cost of two Crests, can dig to bypass monsters on their way; other monsters can’t move past others blocking their way.

The reason I don't favor the Defense, Spell and Trap Crests
is that they're far more situational. Can't defend if you are
not being attacked; can't use the Spell and Trap Crests if
you have no effects that need them in your pool.

All Crests can matter, but since a big part is summoning monsters, moving around, and attacking, those Crests feel more important to me. It takes an Attack Crest to attack an enemy (or the opposing die master). Similarly, if your monster is attacked, you can spend Defense crests for defense. A die’s Crest (minus Summon) may indicate a quantity, so if you roll that side, you get as many of that Crest as indicated. Even starting dice have a few Crest sides with quantities going up to X5.

Deeper into the game, you’ll play on boards with obstacles, special tiles which dungeon tiles cannot be placed on or adjacent to horizontally or vertically. Diagonally is still fine, though.

Tournaments

The game is split into Tournaments divided into three difficulty levels knows as Divisions; at the beginning, you only have the first level unlocked. Each Division is comprised of six tournaments. To unlock a new Division, you must win the six tournaments of the previous one. And in each Division, the first five tournaments are unlocked from the get-go, with the sixth unlocked after clearing the others.

I want dice! What, you thought I was coming over for
trading cards? That's so passé!

Each Tournament features the Player and 15 additional opponents, which will face against each other in brackets. Which means that you’ll be playing four matches each time. Every victory gives the player a new die, the in-game currency, and a reward in G when the tournament is won. The G can then be spent in Grandpa’s shop from the main menu, where you can buy new dice or sell extraneous ones.

The game doesn’t include a Tutorial that would allow you to learn the basics on your own, making the inclusion of the instructions booklet in the Collection vital to figuring out how to play. Maybe you’re like me and think you could practice in Free Mode before jumping in? Nope! You only unlock opponents in Free Mode by beating them in Tournament Play first.

The early manga had an entire arc for Joey in which he would
eventually ditch the bad influences in his life, like the criminal
teen gang he used to be in contact with. The entire focus on
card games cut that out of the anime we got from 4kids.

There is one element I find cool here. Later Tournaments have the classic faces of Yu-Gi-Oh! card games, because duelists like Weevil, Mai or Mako need a different hobby when there are no Duel Monsters events going on, I guess. Even Pegasus joins in! And so do the Rare Hunters from Battle City. However! In the first Division, most opponents are Domino High School students, many of whom were enemies of Yugi and the Pharaoh in the early chapters of the manga. I never expected to see any of these faces in Yu-Gi-Oh! media beyond the manga volumes. The flavor text prior to each match will even mention the events of the chapters they were seen in – though their names were changed to English.

The crunch

Yup. Completely unopposed. That's what happens when the
opponent keeps trying to bring out high-level monsters
while you stick to weaker ones.

I’ve covered the gameplay and how it’s set up. How does it feel to play Dungeon Dice Monsters? For starters: The entire concept of using dice to perform actions is fine, but it comes with its slew of issues, in no small part caused by the extremely luck-based system it creates. There is an attempt at balancing this through dice on different levels – low levels have much higher odds of being summoned, so you can focus on those to start your dungeon at the cost of any significant Crests for later actions. Or you can stockpile Crests using higher-level dice, at the cost of having lower odds of summoning monsters and, thus, risking progress from the opponent while your own dungeon stagnates. Of course, “lower odds” doesn’t mean “no odds”, so you can still end up with a strong monster on the field while you were gathering Crests. Still good in the final stretches of the game.

Maybe it changes over time, and maybe I’m wrong, but I ended up feeling that the Spell and Trap Crests were nearly useless – they find a use when you have a lot of monsters with effects that can be triggered multiple times, but those tend to be born from higher-level dice, and are thus harder to summon in the first place. And even then, effects are not bound to those two types and may require other Crests instead!

I've got enough to attack, I just gotta MOVE now!

Since the crux of the game is to build your dungeon towards the opponent, then moving your pieces towards the opposing die master and attacking them, my personal strategy was to create a quick path towards the opposite half of the board using Level 1 Summons, and pivoting to specific Crests once they were needed – especially Movement and Attack. The dice select menu that opens at the start of your turn is decent in that regard, allowing you to pick a “goal” (either a specific level of Summon, or specific Crests to obtain), and the game will choose the best dice you can still roll for that goal. It’s okay, but due to the number of Summon Crests on most dice, getting the desired Crests is still up to luck.

On the plus side, all three dice rolling the Summon
Crest means you can pick any one of the three.
Sucks for any other Crest, though.

Also, whenever you roll 2+ Summon Crests of the same Level, if you haven’t hit the cap of 10 (and you have room for it), you are forced to Dimension one of the dice that rolled a Summon Crest, whether you want to or not. You might think of circumventing this by only rolling dice of different levels when you’re fishing for Crests, but the Summon Crests can still be rolled, they will just be useless. Or maybe you roll two dice of a level and a third of another, to lower the odds of success – that works too, sure.

I eventually settled on a strategy where I’d always summon the monster from the worse die, so that I would keep the better Crest options in my pool. When a die is deployed onto the field to create your dungeon, it’s gone for the remainder of the match; that’s why there’s a limit leaving you with 5 dice at minimum!

In my experience, most matches ended up very one-sided, with only a few surprises here and there. Then again, I have only played through Division 1, so who knows, maybe matches become more interesting down the line. And whenever the game ended up at a standstill, it became so painfully slow and long and boring. Didn’t happen often; but it could. And when that happens, there just isn’t a way out.

Sometimes the Defense Crest triggers, and
sometimes it doesn't. I think it's up to the
rock-paper-scissors type effectiveness.

Some matches I remember:

It's actually fun when you have the Crests to move in a
significant manner.

-Playing against Bakura, I was constantly rolling for the Crests I needed. Meanwhile, he had been saving up Movement Crests, and he used 11 of them to send one of his monsters directly to my die master, which I had foolishly left unguarded. With my inability to get Movement Crests worth a damn, I couldn’t send a monster for protection in the three turns it took for me to lose.

-An opponent had stockpiled a massive amount of Defense Crests (30+), and got a Tunneling monster to move between my creature and their die master. I couldn’t attack fast enough to deplete their reserves, and their dungeon was set up so this was the only path to their master. I literally couldn’t do anything. I was all out of summons, too.

-So many matches where I quickly created my dungeon, reaching all the way to the other die master, while the opponent gathered Crests or just didn't have the luck to bring out a monster out in time. The opposite rarely happened.

Occasionally, when the opponent is smart, you can end up
having to build your dungeon more intelligently.

The reality of random rolls is that you can never know how a game will go. When Summons are happening and significant actions are being made, the game is fine, but when both players are just rolling dice to gather crests, or can’t do anything because they fail to get the stuff they need… God, these matches can end up being so dull. Frequently, you can tell a winner 5 turns before the end. And in general, unless you also stockpile Crests, chances are that if the enemy breaks through your defenses, you can end up unable to fight back.

The worst part, though? When you start a tournament, you must play all four of its matches without leaving the game. Gotta leave for any reason? Got stuck and can’t do anything? Too bad! If you exit, you must start the whole tournament over. Same thing if you lose a match, even if you were in the finale. Ugh. The pause menu has exactly three options: “End Turn”, “Battle On” (AKA “Continue Turn”), and “Quit Game”.

Soft/Quick Save? What's that?

Final words

Seeing a die develop during a Dimension is kinda fun.
Building your dungeon is a pretty major part of the
strategy after all. Gotta choose the right shape!

Yeah… Not my cup of tea. I tried to tough it out, but I had no interest continuing past the first Division. Which still gave me plenty of experiences to talk about the game. “Dull” from two paragraphs ago sums it up best; while there can be decent depth to the strategy element here. You can tailor your pool of 15 dice to whichever strategy you’d like, but due to the reliance on die rolls, and thus random chance at all times, your options always end up limited. On one hand I can sort of get why some specific gameplay decisions were made; as you may guess, a lot of mechanics here were in the manga arc itself, so it was pretty much necessary to keep them as they were presented. And yet, it feels like the game would have been better with a few tweaks to reduce the potential number of turns spent doing nothing. No tutorial available is also a major issue, as you’re left with the info from the booklet and then to figure everything else on your own.

Celtic Guardian, Kuriboh, Sangan... It does somewhat bug
me that they just took the monsters of the Yu-Gi-Oh! card
game and made them into DDM dice. Makes DDM feel
even more derivative. I miss the original creatures from the
short manga arc.

I haven’t run into enough interesting dice monsters with effects to see any significant uses for Spell and Trap Crests. Similarly, I’m still not sure I had completely figured out the mechanics of battle and the rock-paper-scissors type matchups yet, which has led to combat feeling weird half the time. When you’re so limited in which actions you can make every turn, type matchups are usually the least of your worries!

Neither the die collection nor Grandpa’s Shop includes a menu to sort the available dice by type, level, or specific crests you’re looking for, so that you focus on which dice are best for your pool or for purchase. Doesn’t help that so many die prices in the shop feel downright arbitrary. You might overspend on a die and then find out it’s not worth more, gameplay-wise, than stuff you already had. And for what it’s worth, I do appreciate that the menu before rolling dice in the game allows you to choose what you want to focus on that turn, increasing your odds of getting what you need.

I bet this game doesn't even include the monster from the
manga that allowed the die master to fight back.

To me, the worst deal-breaker is the inability to pause and quit in the middle of a tournament – matches can take a while, so winning 4 in a row, non-negotiable… Yeah, that’s a no for me. I think I would accept it better if some form of quick save was available so you could leave the game and return to it later, without that clocking as an instant loss. I don’t mind as much the lack of a proper story, because the tournaments you can play in still give you that feeling of facing against stronger opponents as you progress. Also, of course, there’s a multiplayer mode where players can face each other using a Link Cable, and! Unlike the other games reviewed so far this month, that feature HAS been unlocked in the Early Days Collection.

Sorry Duke, – I think your game’s kinda dull. Oh, I’m sure it’s got its fans; but to me, it’s meh at best. Okay, one more from this collection and then I can start focusing on something else.