Some happen instantly, while others can be turned into items in your inventory. Most enemies also come with a reward for defeating them. They might cap the number of dice you can use per roll, or cause you to lose items, or bring more monsters into the fight. The fights are spiced up by the enemy abilities, which can interact in all sorts of interesting ways. You roll and assign hits, then take damage if any enemies are left standing. The dice include accommodations for the colorblind, in the form of color-specific rings on each die face. Yellow dice are the least likely to connect, while your lone red provides a guaranteed hit.

You pick which dice you want from your pool, keeping in mind the hit rates of the various colors. Three of 20 Strong’s twenty dice are used to track these stats, which can go up or down as the game progresses. The stats are pretty simple to understand: Health is how much damage you can take before losing, Strategy controls your inventory size and the number of times you can re-roll during a fight, and Recovery dictates the rate of return for your used dice. You start by picking a character, who comes with starting stats and a special ability. You fight a string of bad guys until you’re ready to take on the final boss.

All three, to my disappointment, are tower defense games. Solar Sentinels comes with the system, while decks based on Too Many Bones and Hoplomachus Victorum are sold separately. Starting HandĪt the moment, there are three decks for 20 Strong. The first deck was a tower defense game, but the others could be whatever designers wanted. When I spoke to Chip Theory at PAXU in December of last year, they talked about all the ways the system might develop. The specifics of play change from game to game, depending on what deck of cards you use. 20 Strong consists of 20 dice and a poker chip, along with a basic set of rules. Second, it’s a modular system, rather than a game. Not only that, it’s a small design from a publisher known for enormous designs, which made me all the more curious. Most of Chip Theory’s catalogue doesn’t speak to me, but I was immediately interested when they announced 20 Strong in late 2022. Here we have 20 Strong from Chip Theory Games, best known as the publisher of Too Many Bones. Can it weather a year of Andrew’s expectations in this Meeple Mountain review? Chip Theory’s much-anticipated new dice game 20 Strong made its debut at Essen 2023.

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