While I’m not sure I would go the full length to say that efficiency is the highest form of beauty, I’d certainly say that I can find efficiency to indeed be beautiful. In controlled environments, I enjoy testing my own efficiency (typing tests, programming and Sudoku competitions, competitive Sims). Many of these environments feature elements of uncertainty, meaning that managing probabilistic outcomes is key to being efficient (in Sudoku bifurcation can sometimes be faster than reasoning through complex logical chains; in a programming contest, you might luck out on some buggy or sub-optimal algorithm actually passing all test cases anyway). I’ve recently enjoyed a challenging game which has probability management at its core.
FUSE is a real-time dice game from designer Kane Klenko. Players play bomb defusal experts who are trying to defuse bombs; this is represented by rolling dice and placing them on ‘bomb’ cards to match constraints. The team rolls some number of dice, and then allocates them to the cards, incurring penalties if some of the dice cannot be allocated. The game itself has a hard time limit of 10 minutes, so quick thinking is encouraged as players get more turns (and thus more rolls of the dice).
The dice are almost standard six-sided dice; interestingly, I noticed that it was not the case that opposite faces of each die added up to seven (2 was opposite 4 and 3 opposite 5, for some reason). The dice come in five colours (red, blue, black, yellow and green), and there are five dice of each colour. Card constraints may involve numbers, colours or both, and vary widely in the difficulty; easy cards have requirements like “two dice matching in either colour or number” or “A – B = 2”, while more difficult ones can involve building a six-die pyramid where each die is a specific colour. The bombs are rated in difficulty from 1 to 6, skipping 5.
Some bombs also introduce ordering constraints, requiring players to build a tower or pyramid (and players are not allowed to build unsupported structures). There is also a dexterity element here, as the penalty for knocking over a tower or pyramid is losing all progress on that card.
I’ve only played solo or in a team of two. Playing solo, a player draws and rolls three dice at the beginning of his/her turn, and then allocates them to a pool of four active cards, possibly placing multiple dice on a single card. At any time (except towards the end of the game), there are four active cards and five cards in a ‘market’ ready to become active when an active card is completed.
I’ve been able to complete the single-player “Elite” difficulty (getting through 23 cards in 10 minutes) about half of the time if playing with a random mix of 27 cards, and have done it (once in ten attempts or so) if playing with cards drawn from the most difficult sets (i.e. all the level 6s and 4s, with all remaining cards being level 3s).
I made some simple tactical observations regarding card constraints. For example, there is a level 2 card requiring three numbers that sum to 11. If I have a free choice of a number to play there, I would play as close to 4 as possible (considering that two dice most likely sum to 7).
I think the main strategy in solo play involves ensuring that one’s cards don’t end up having conflicting demands, as far as possible. For example, consider the following set of cards.
This is an awful situation to be in, because apart from one space for a 1, all of the cards here demand high numbers to start. Four decreasing numbers only admits a 4 or higher (and even then, I find starting that card with a 4 very restrictive as it forces 3-2-1); the 15 sum only admits a 3 or higher (and then forces 6-6; I usually play one six and then on a later turn find a pair adding to 9). Misaligned numerical constraints can be painful; misaligned colour constraints might be even worse because colours are sampled without replacement (well, until card(s) are cleared or penalties are incurred). There is a level 4 card that demands four dice of the same colour, which I try not to pick up.
There are many cards that have rather specific requirements (e.g. a specific colour and number); I tend to try to carry one or maybe two of these at a time, while trying to ensure the rest of the cards cycle regularly. The penalty for a unused die involves re-rolling it, and then removing a die that matches in terms of colour or number (if possible).
Although the game only lasts ten minutes (or less, if the deck is cleared in time), I’ve found it to be highly addictive, especially difficult runs on the elite difficulty. I’d expect times to vary quite widely as it’s a dice game, though I’ve noticed that I run out of time with between one and three cards from the end most of the time. I’ve never counted, but it wouldn’t be unreasonable to average fifteen seconds for a turn, and to some extent things average out over 120 selections and rolls. As mentioned above, I think a key part of solo FUSE strategy involves managing interactions between the requirements of active cards.
Minor criticisms would include some disconnect in the difficulty of the cards. I find that most of the level 6s are less luck-dependent than some of the lower level cards, like the level 3 “any 5, a yellow die, and a green 2”. More bizarrely, the ‘6-5-4 pyramid’ card in the photo above is only level 2, though it’s considerably more restrictive than the ‘sum to 15’ card also in the photo (level 3). There might be a case for a more permissive card being rated higher if the cost of verifying correctness is higher (e.g. ‘three digit prime number’), but I don’t think adding three numbers introduces much overhead.
The ceiling for individual card difficulty also isn’t very high. The highest stacks are of height 5 (with very loose constraints) and pyramids of height 3 (using six dice). I’d imagine there would be scope to define some level 8 cards that might use seven or more dice and/or require combinations that are stricter or more complex, like a six-die pyramid where each die not placed on the ground level must equal the sum of the two dice directly underneath it, or even something like this:
I’ve played this with a friend from Imperial as well. With two players, each player has two active cards, four dice are rolled and each player must take two dice. We only played up to the standard difficulty. I’d like to play this with a bigger group, though; communication gets much trickier, and also with two I am able to maintain sufficient context in my head to compute a good allocation of four dice across two sets of two cards. With five, there are 10 active cards, which would probably be unreasonable to keep track of.
In summary, I’d highly recommend this game based on my solo/pair experiences. I’ve probably had about twenty to twenty-five playthroughs in total, and have enjoyed it thoroughly even though I generally don’t enjoy real-time games. Each run is short, but can generate an adrenaline rush, and the difficulty level is highly configurable so it should be possible to find a level that works well. I might even extend the game with some custom “hard mode” cards (this can be done by getting opaque sleeves so the backs are indistinguishable). I haven’t yet had the opportunity to play with a larger group, which should bring new and interesting challenges too.
