Iron Curtain is a Cold War game of military mobilization, worker deployment, and good, old-fashioned luck. To win, you’ll need what every great empire does: the support of the people. Feed smarter and stronger workers and use them wisely to gain warhead-weilding supremacy – all while protecting yourself from spies and traitors – in this deck-building style dice game.
Each player starts with 8 food dice and 4 basic worker dice.
Food: 1F / 1F / 1F / 1F / 1F / 2F
Worker: 1F / 1F / 1W / 1W / 1W / 1W
On each turn, players will:
- Score any workers that are still in play.
- Randomly draw six dice from their supply and roll them.
- Use their rolled dice to:
- Deploy new workers
- Build Walls
- Hire new workers
Workers
Workers are broken into three different categories:
- Laborers (Foreman, Steelworker, Journalist, Scientist, and Engineer)
- Operatives (Spy, Thief, Soldier, Grifter, and Capitalist)
- Contractors (Diplomat, Ally, Consultant, Inventor, and Specialist)
Laborers are your productive employees. In addition to special abilities they might have, they produce resources which are worth victory points at the end of the game.
- Ex. When Engineer scores, claim one Weapon token from the supply. *When Engineer scores, add one die from your used pile to your next roll.
Operatives are the bad guys. They don't produce any resources, but help you by hurting other players in different ways.
- Ex. When Soldier scores, each other player must remove one die to their used pile. *When Soldier is attacked, you may discard it instead of the intended target.
Contractors are relationships you've built, so you don't have to pay any food costs to use them (as you do with the other two classes,) just their initial cost.
- Ex. When Inventor is deployed, choose one of your rolled dice and return it; select any other die and pay only the difference. *Instead, roll the new die immediately.
"*" is an example of each worker's special ability. Only three workers from each category will be available each game; each worker has three different possible special abilities.
Building Walls
The back of every resource token will look the same and players keep their resources face down in front of them (they can look at them at any time.) Players can build Walls by using a resource token, face down, underneath an active worker. Doing so will protect the worker from one attack against them; instead of discarding/losing the die, they instead discard the Wall. Players may also receive Walls to use as a scoring bonus (Ex. Foreman.)
Game End
After the last worker has been hired from 4 different types of workers, players have one last turn and then count up the points earned from their resource tokens.
Thoughts
I tried to take what I did like from existing dice-building games and incorporate new elements, as well as balance some of the inadequacies. Ultimately, I think this game ends up too close to existing games to be viable, but I would love some feedback on it.
I have additional info on cards, full rules, etc if you need clarification.
Thanks!
