A different twist on an old mechanic.

So another player is rolling one of the dice for the 'active' player? That doesn't fix anything...

Maybe you could use something else like "Rolling 5d6 and choosing the two lowest rolls." You could use this to *slow* all players down... On the FLIP SIDE, "Rolling 5d6 and choosing the two highest rolls" would probably speed things up a bit and favour FASTER game play.

Maybe a mechanic such as these might lend more to your desire to either *Slow down* or *Speed up* a player's game play. You could have a SPECIAL card in your game that "Speeds up" the game for a turn... That could add some variety to your game (Slow and Fast)...

You could also vary the AMOUNT of dice, like using 3 or 4 instead of 5d6...

Just some ideas off the top of my head!

Notice that if you are using the "choose the lowest 2 dice out of 5d6", using 4 dice improves the odds for higher rolls, even more so with 3 dice.

I'll be honest. With all of the new board/card games that are prevalent today, I think the standard "roll-and-move around a board" game concept is archaic and too simplistic. You may get an audience, but you'll never tap the new generation of board gamers.

It's one track...going around a board. The player has no real choice other than what the dice gives them.

I had a discussion with my old co-worker at Victory Point Games recently about this. The conclusion we came up with was a track that was more like a grid, then rolling 3 dice instead of 2, with the player choosing which two dice they want to use to move. It gives the player more options instead of a restricted 2 dice move on one track.

You'd need to give incentive to the player on why moving, say a lower amount, may be more beneficial than just choosing the two highest numbers.

But I suppose you can figure that out ;)

Appologies if the following is too far away from the problem you're having, but:

From that description... Why have a board at all? From the way you describe the game, the fun - and the social aspect of the game - is the wheeling and dealing, trading, aspect, and you seem to be using the board entirely to determine how to move along the board, and how much you can buy from the bank for a game where the entire point of it is buying things from the bank and trading with other players to create sets.

Without knowing the range of things for buying things from the board, you may be able to replace rolling 2d6 to move around the track with rolling 1d3 (Simply a d6 marked with two 1s, two 2s and two 3s), or come up with a different way of seeding cards into the players hands for them to trade with other players.

Or, in short, why do you seem to be taking inspiration from Monopoly... and the 80s paradigm... for a game where the primary form of play, as you describe it [Trading with others to get combinations that you're after] seems closer to Pit?

Alternatively - If you want to keep a race aspect (since a problem of people getting far ahead of others in a game with dice movement only really makes sense if moving further on the track is an actual advantage, rather than where you are on the track is purely there to tell you what you can do, but the victory is unconnected to your position on the track), maybe trade resources between players to create collections of different things, which can then be traded for movement (e.g. one object allows movement of 1 space on the track, two different objects 3 spaces, three different objects 6 spaces, and so on)? Combining that with a track which gives various boons and penalties could potentially make for interesting decisions in how many spaces to move, and if you want to trade your second truck for your opponant's banana to allow you to consume three items for movement instead of two. You'd still need a way, which could potentially be done by the track as in the current design.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not entirely opposed to rolling dice and moving appropriately - I'm a fan of backgammon, for example - I'm just not getting what rolling dice and moving that many spaces adds to the specific game you describe.