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Color and Roll Your Way to Victory With Chroma Cubes

By Scott Bogen on 09/30/2014 • ( 1 )

Written by Scott Bogen, The Board Game Show podcast

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There’s no longer a need to gaze longingly at your child’s crayon collection. Just pick up a copy of Chroma Cubes, and you’ll have the very best reason to take up coloring again. Not only that, you’ll be rolling dice. Yes, crayons, dice and coloring are featured in this light and strategic game by 5th Street Games, the team behind Mob Town and Ghosts Love Candy.

There are two colors featured on each die face. The shapes allow the color blind to play, too.

There are two colors featured on each die face. You are allowed to use one of them. The unique shapes allow older or color blind players to play, too.

A game of Chroma Cubes begins with each player rolling six dice. The result will be a collection of colors (two different colors on each side of every die) that can be used to color in areas of a picture on your game sheet, not unlike a coloring book. One of our games featured a game sheet depicting four gifts, each gift with many areas to color. Another sheet featured a stain glass window divided into five large sections, each section with many individual areas to color. While you may be thinking that Chroma Cubes is just about rolling the dice and coloring, it’s not. The real fun and strategy comes into play in three clever ways.

First, as game sheets are divided into sections (or figures), being the first player to completely color in a figure awards you the maximum number of points. Each subsequent player to finish the same figure claims fewer points than the person before him.

Coloring the top section of the beak requires two orange, while the cardinal’s wing requires two reds. To the right of the page, note the scale of points for each completed section. Being the first player to complete the top-right portion of the figure gets you 22 points!

Second, all those areas you’re coloring in will require one or more colors to complete. That’s right, if you’re playing with the game sheet picturing the cardinal, don’t think you’ll get by filling in the under belly of the majestic Cardinalidae with a single red pip on your dice. Nope. You’ll need four reds to fill in that section! On a related note, you should know that you are allowed to allocate just one of the two colors that show up on each die, not both. Filling in these larger areas is not unlike getting Yahtzee, albeit a little easier than that.

That brings us to the third game mechanic, which is setting aside dice each turn for later use. You may have just rolled a couple of yellows, but you need a total of four to complete that sun in your picture. But you also need green and blue! What to do??!!! The kicker is that when it’s time to roll dice again, you can only roll the cubes you’ve actually used to color in sections on the previous turn. Use a cube, you can roll it. Set it aside, and you better hope you can use it next turn or sometime soon. (By the way, you can also trade dice with players, so you’re not necessarily completely stuck if you can’t use a cube.)

While Chroma Cubes will be enjoyed by adults and children alike, a seasoned professional such as you will enjoy finding creative strategies for coloring in your picture for maximum victory points. Just say that out loud for a second, “a strategy for coloring your picture.” That’s right. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, how awesome is it to play a game with crayons? Perhaps more fun than you may imagine.

It brought me great joy to look around the table on game night to see all my 40-year-old friends coloring at the same time. You can’t buy moments like that. Oh, wait, yes you can. It’s called Chroma Cubes.

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