Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
From time to time, I get the chance to review a game that is just a breeze on the table. The game aspires to entertain, but not at a world-class level. The production is good, not great. The rules make sense because the rules are straightforward, a pleasure in an age where rulebooks are constantly—and correctly—under fire because rulebooks overcomplicate a simple affair like chucking dice to score points.
Piña Coladice (2024, IELLO) is one such game. It doesn’t offend because it cannot. It borrows liberally from the Yahtzee School of Dice Games: roll five dice, up to a total of three times, and take your results to score something on the score sheet or the table. Then, Piña Coladice combines the Yahtzee rule set with Tic Tac Toe (or, depending on your age bracket, Tic Tac Dough), and adds a fourth row/column. At any time, a player who marks their territory with a token in a complete row, column or diagonal wins the game immediately.
StegegetS Moomin (2023, Ion Game Studios) forged a similar path, but tossed the complete system into the air with a beautiful concept—what if we made the entire game “board” a coloring sheet with fun characters and individual player powers, in a family-weight game that accommodates a larger player count? That game was one of my ten favorite games of 2023, and for good reason, as it still remains in my collection.
Piña Coladice does what it can with these simple systems, and a boozy theme, right down to player colors shaped by wooden meeples in four different colors aligned with four different cocktail glass shapes. (“Sold!”, said the man writing this article.) Sometimes, you roll and you get a small straight…and if that spot in the grid is in play for a particular game (there is light variability to the setup), you can place your marker on that spot, blocking it from other players. In a three- or four-player game, there are additional spots on each space of the grid. With two players, there’s only one spot, making each placement a little more important due to space limitation.
For players trying their best to win, it is generally best to clump all your scoring markers near each other, as players score bonus points for successive placements orthogonally or diagonally adjacent to their other placed tokens. So, while only one of my three games ended with a “Piña Coladice”—the instant win with four tokens in a row—the other games all ended with a player scoring the most points by reaching 20+ points before another player, which triggers the end game.
Tic Tac Toe Tequila
It’s just more fun to go for the four-in-a-row, right? Piña Coladice is more exciting that way, but to win, playing it safe is definitely the smarter move.
The question people are asking in my house: whether Piña Coladice is more thrilling than Yahtzee, My Shelfie: The Dice Game, King of the Dice, King of the Dice: The Board Game, Sausage Sizzle, Farkle, or That’s So Clever!. We own most of those other games, and between those experiences, as well as dice systems like Tenzi—which has like 50 different game rules included in its slim box—Piña Coladice is going to have a tough time breaking through.
If you don’t own any of those other games, Piña Coladice isn’t a bad call. It’s easy to teach and plays in 10-15 minutes. (The ruleset is definitely kid-friendly, but younger children can greatly slow play, as kids take longer turns to think about whether it makes sense to re-roll their results for a second or third try.) But the updated release of Sausage Sizzle from 2024 has more highs thanks to its steeper push-your-luck factor, and it comes in at a slightly lower price point than Piña Coladice.
Piña Coladice is a fun gift for a gamer who doesn’t own many other dice games in the “re-rolling and locking” genre, particularly if they like a theme centered around a good cocktail. Otherwise, this is a crowded field, so take your time looking around to find a system that feels perfect for your gaming groups!
Piña Coladice details
- Designer: Yann Dupont
- Artists: Crocotame
- Publishers: Hobby Japan, IELLO, White Goblin Games
- Release Date: 2024
- Player count : 2 - 4
- Age range : 8+
- Time range : 10 - 20 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Connections, Dice Rolling
- BGG Geek Rating: 6.94864 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 3.5.
- More articles about Piña Coladice.
Thank You, nice review! Of those you mentioned I have Clever, Farkle, and Yatzee. In your opinion, would you say Sizzle or Moomin (or Pina) would be the best add to those?