Welcome to my first ‘mini expansion mini review’ for this little £10 dice and card expansion for the excellent Cthulhu-meets-Yahtzee push your luck game Ancient Terrible Things.

Even as a fan of the game (which is in my Top 50 games), I found the original re-rolling mechanism a little frustrating. Most of the time you could only reroll individual dice (by spending tough-to-get tokens), rather than being able to ‘lock’ dice and reroll the rest – so if you already had a totally crap roll it cost a lot of tokens to try and make it a better.

Recognising the problem, they did release a downloadable ‘version 2.5’ rule update that changed this to allow you to spend tokens to reroll or lock dice, but it’s fair to say a lot of owners of the original game would never have seen it.

In the company’s recent release, Konja (which uses the same ‘dice quest’ dice system), the designers added two extra dice and some cards that dialled-up the reroll system a step further. These white dice are used to activate cards that let you either reroll or lock – but if you don’t need to use them, there’s a 50-50 chance per dice (three sides are blank) you’ll have rolled a symbol which will let you instead take much-needed bonus tokens. It’s a small change, but it works really well.

What Madness of McGuffin does (you guessed it…) is introduce this system to Ancient Terrible Things.

Each player starts with two extra cards that represent these two re-roll options: the lock option card doesn’t ‘exhaust’, so could be used twice in a round (with both white dice) – while the standard reroll card does.

Another nice twist is that the reroll card can alternatively, at any time, be ‘sold’ to give you two cash. Money is often hard to come by in the game (especially using scenario two), and some of the loot is super tempting, so this gives you the option of giving up a nice reroll ability to grab that swag item you’ve always dreamt of owning.

Eight cards for £10 would be a bit of rip off. But don’t worry – you also get a complete new set of 16 dice for the game, including the two new white dice and three purple ones (used with the Lost Charter expansion). Unfortunately these dice are a little smaller than the awesome ones in the original game, but frankly the little skull pips totally make up for that in terms of theme – and despite being a little smaller they’re still high quality.

Conclusion

If you’re a fan of Ancient Terrible Things, I think this is worth picking up. It certainly makes the reroll situation more interesting, while adding a little extra theme for those who want it. I think my only lingering problem with the game now is the swag cards, which seem so much fun but are generally hard to get. I think I’ might draft some $1 items at the start of the game, and perhaps allow players to trade in unwanted items for half their value when shopping at the store. Maybe I should go try that out…

The Ancient Terrible Things: Madness of McGuffin mini expansion is available direct from publisher Pleasant Company Games, which has a lot of great little add-ons for its games over at its online store. Thank you to them for providing a copy for review.