Designer: Rüdiger Dorn
Let’s be honest, it’s almost insulting how simple the contents of the box are. You could pretty much make your own copy with a handful of index cards and the dice you have lying around the house. That being said, while Las Vegas is an incredibly simple game, its surprisingly interesting. It’s an abstract game regarding dice rolling and pushing your luck. On the flip side, it really does not feel like or have anything to do with the theme, short of ‘dice exist’.
You randomly lay out stacks of money next to casinos, each with a die number on them. Players then roll all of the dice in their color, and then place all of one set of dice that share numbers on the corresponding casinos. After all the dice have been placed in this manner, you distribute money to each player based on who had the most dice on each casino – whoever had the most die gets the largest bill, second most gets the second choice, so on and so forth.
Interesting Mechanic: Discard Ties. There is one twist that makes this interesting, and that is that ties are bad — once rolling is completed, you simply remove all duplicate dice counts. This dramatically adds strategy to a simple game — you can place dice strategically to cancel out an opponent’s gains, or near the end of the round, you can try to bottom feed with one die where you see two opponents are going to tie with three dice.
Las Vegas is a simple, fast and fun game. I do wish it had more to do with its casino than just a theme, but for a quick and easy game, it’s very well done.
(Photo credit: Purple Pawn)
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