Proving Grounds is a solitaire dice-based game with a peculiar mechanic around re-rolling, giving you sixty seconds to settle on your rolls and then matching them up to the six enemy cards your character is currently fighting. It’s a fun little distraction but ultimately I don’t think it puts enough strategy or power in your hands to mitigate the randomness of the dice rolls and the restrictions around rerolls.
There’s a complicated back story to Proving Grounds, which comes with a novelette that gets into it, but it’s immaterial to the play itself. Your character faces six enemies at a time and must try to defeat eight enemies – they get replaced when you kill one – before taking five ‘wounds’ from all of your enemies. Enemy cards have battle tracks up their right sides that spell out how many dice and in what combinations you need to roll to hit them, moving the battle marker up one spot on the track. If a battle marker on an enemy reaches the top spot, you have defeated that enemy and get to remove that card from the game, replacing it with the next card from the enemy deck.
You start the game with eight dice to roll, and in each round you get sixty seconds to roll and re-roll until you get a result you like or the timer runs out. (Renegade has an app that includes a timer and lets you track how many enemies you’ve defeated.) When you roll the dice, you group them into sets by value. You can re-roll any set of dice, but if you have a single die with a particular value, you can’t re-roll that unless you end up matching it by re-rolling some other set. You can keep re-rolling sets and regrouping the dice, but you roll complete sets at once and you can only roll one set at a time.
When you’ve finished rolling, you assign each die or set of dice to the card in that value’s slot around the board. For example, if you have three dice with the value of 1, those dice go to attack the enemy in slot #1. If you have enough dice to meet the criteria in the next spot up the battle track on that card – usually a minimum number of dice, occasionally an extra criterion to have at least one nonwhite die – you may move the marker up. If, however, you have only a single die with that value, you move the battle marker down one slot. When the battle marker reaches the bottom spot, you sustain a wound, moving the wound marker down on its track, then restoring the battle marker on that card to its start position. This feature informs your re-rolling strategy, as you will want to try to avoid creating singles for any enemies with battle markers one spot above the bottom.
Some enemies have other unique features on them. One card’s battle track works in reverse – singles move the battle marker up, sets move it down. Most of your dice are white, but there are green, purple, and yellow dice as well, and some cards count those as two dice apiece, both for purposes of determining whether to move the marker up or down (one die that counts as two thus also counts as a set) and for determining whether you have enough dice to move the marker up the battle track.
When you sustain a wound, you take one die and place it on the top spot on the exhaustion track, which has three spaces on it (although you can stack dice on any space). At the end of each round, you move dice on that track down one space, so after a die has spent three rounds on that track, it returns to your pool. The health track also has additional dice you gain after you’ve sustained three or four wounds, helping shift the odds a little in your favor.
The best part of Proving Grounds is the timed feature: the added pressure of the timer makes the decisions of whether to continue rolling and which sets to re-roll feel more fun, like a real-time quiz or puzzle, and creates the possibility that you’ll rethink certain decisions after the round ends. But the game is overly dependent on the luck of the dice, and once you have a single, it’s not that easy to get rid of it in the base game or some of the additional modules that come with it.
Those modules tend to increase the game’s complexity while shifting around some of the balance of the game. One gives you a dragon die that has five sides that are beneficial and one that requires you to reroll all of your sets. Another includes chariot cards that will ‘activate’ unless you place the required dice on them, raising the level of difficulty. The Inspiration module gives you a single card with a power you’ll keep for the entire game. They’re all tweaks to the base game that add complexity and change strategy, but I don’t think any does enough to mitigate the randomness at the game’s heart. As solitaire games go, it’s probably just good enough to recommend, but is behind other solo games I like more, such as Coffee Roaster, Friday, Onirim, or even Aerion.