Bin'Fa

Bin’Fa is a game that has always used dice.

The way the dice are used has varied a bit; depending upon what you are doing (i.e., gather supplies or maneuver armies), there are four ways the dice have been used:

• Roll two dice, use one (range: 1-6).
• Roll two dice, use the difference (range: 0-5).
• Roll two dice, use both (range: 2-12).
• Roll two dice, check to see if either is a 6 (range: yes/no).

The question is this: are dice needed? No, no they are not.

If you take away the dice, there are other options. From using fixed values to cards to other more exotic methods. If you were to simplify Bin’Fa to the its absolute core—one of the things that will be happening for the start of the campaign—you would use fixed values.

The way this would work is you would assign the value of anything that the dice would be used for to a value of 3.

• Gather supplies—when you take this action, gain three supply tokens.
• Maneuver armies—when you take this action, spend one supply token and get three moves.
• Dislodge a stack—when you move to dislodge an enemy stack, spend one supply token and use all three moves you received (see above) to dislodge a stack.

In such a system, the game becomes more like Chess, in that there is no doubt as to the outcome of a move, it is all about out maneuvering your opponent(s).

This is one element of the game and what happens to it if you strip away everything that is not essential. There are many ways, as I said, to put random numbers back into the game. And the campaign will be exploring multiple methods… which one will you discover as you go through the story? Which one will you use after the campaign is over?