The thing to remember about dice is that their nobody’s friends, as likely to betray one moment as they are rain down blessings and benedictions the next. Like any good game of chance, then, the point becomes not to ride the rolls and hope for the best but rather learn a strategy that takes the randomness into account while having a reasonable chance of countering the moves of your opponent. Almost every sprawling adventure since Final Fantasy VIII’s Triple Triad has had its own little mini-game, and Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla’s was a dice game that everyone in its world was ready to throw down for. Orlog could be found just about everywhere, simple enough to blow off a few rounds but with enough strategy to require a little care and thought in each encounter, and now the dice are about ready to move from the digital world to the real one.
While Pure Arts is best known for its impressive figures, it’s licensed Orlog from Ubisoft and today launched a Kickstarter to bring the dice game to life. The rules are fully hammered out in Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla so the goal of the Kickstarter it to drum up the production funds, which it succeeded in doing in the first couple hours. The initial plan was to release Orlog in two versions- regular and the fancy Tavern edition, which comes with a linen game mat and horn mug replica. Both versions come with two sets of six dice, two flat bowls to cast the dice into so they don’t go bouncing everywhere, health tokens, a game coin to flip at the start to determine who goes first, two sets of twenty god favor cards that grant special abilities, plus a pile of tokens to power the favors. Seeing as at the time of this writing the Kickstarter has more than tripled its initial goal it’s also earned a few stretch upgrades, such as the health stones being actual polished stone instead of cardboard counters. Orlog is getting nicely fancy for its inaugural edition, and with two weeks on the Kickstarter clock there’s plenty of room to grow.
Orlog launched today on Kickstarter and you can findthe campaign here. If you missed playing it in Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, there’s a helpful how-to video below to give an overview of how a deadly Viking dice battle plays out.
