by Nathan Jenne

Making Panda Royale was so much fun! Not long after my brother Jake and I developed this game, we demoed it to our families. Since then, it has become a family hit, and we've been asked to bring it to nearly every family gathering.

My wife, Maegen, repeatedly encouraged us to publish this game and told us it would be a hit. She was right — and it's not that I didn't believe her, but Jake and I had extremely ambitious plans to make custom molds for each class of dice. We really wanted to make the dice stand out, yet we were concerned about the cost of the game. Would anyone pay US$40 for a dice game?

We knew this game needed to have a high player count and really wanted to hit ten players. Jake and I frequently had conversations about how we could reduce the cost of the game. We discussed the possibility of making the design an eight- or even six-player game. We talked about writing the rules to allow people to combine two copies of the game to reach higher player counts.

Nothing seemed right. We knew it needed to accommodate ten players, and we knew that custom molds would break the bank.

Finally, one day we sat down to talk yet again about making this game feasible. It finally occurred to us that we could modify a few small rules and use different colors to distinguish the positive and negative numbers, after which we could forgo the custom molds and use standard dice.

Of course we had to replay the game hundreds of times to tweak its balance, but we made it work! Aside from our families being upset that we made more rule changes, they loved the game even more than before.


How the Idea Was Born

Panda Royale started a couple years ago when Jake was trying to entertain his son. Since we have designed and published many games through Last Night Games, we have amassed quite a collection of game bits, including dice. Jake was playing with his son and pulled out a bag of dice that contained many different colors. He challenged his son to see who could roll the highest numbers, then started adding rules that allowed each player to increase their score based on the different colors of dice.

Jake recognized that something super interesting was happening. He loved the idea that each player could start with a single die and add another die to their hand each round until every player had a huge fist full of dice.

Then began the challenging part. Jake and I ran through dozens of scoring strategies, trying to find the right balance. We wanted multiple strategies to be viable while still being different.

We initially had an idea that one class of dice would let you score your left and right opponents' dice of that same class. We worked hard trying to balance this out, but ultimately it relied too much on chance and a player couldn't control what their opponents were going to do, making the strategy very weak.

One of the trickier classes of dice was the red panda clan. We wanted to include red pandas in the game, but since they aren't giant pandas, we wanted their class of dice to be a little different. The idea of incorporating both positive and negative numbers, then allowing players to multiply by the number of dice was one of the best things we did for the energy in this game. The red panda clan causes the biggest game upsets. Players win big when unchecked...or they fizzle out.

One of our later additions to the game was the clear trading dice. Adding the clear dice brought a whole new dimension to the design. We were now able to mitigate chance a little more and disrupt other players' strategies. Be careful how you use this power as its effects can last beyond the end of the game.

Let us not forget about the pink pity pandas. They are the medics of your team. They rush to your aid when you have a particularly low round to pick you up. Every time I explain the pity dice to a gamer at a convention, I watch their face and look for their smile. Everyone smiles when they learn of the pity dice. Who doesn't want a catch-up mechanism? Who doesn't love a pity panda?

Once we had settled on the seven panda clans, we had to go about balancing the clans at all player counts. That was remarkably difficult!


Despite all the dice we had amassed over the years, we found that we needed even more. I spent hundreds of dollars buying single dice so we could have enough dice in each shape and color to make a complete game. Up to that point, we had assembled only enough dice for a six-player game.

After buying more dice, we played hundreds of rounds of Panda Royale at different player counts to tune the distribution. Even after all those plays, I still didn't feel that it was enough. I broke out my computer, wrote a program to run simulations on various distributions of dice, then ran thousands of simulations.

As I changed the distribution of dice, I would find bias in different classes of dice, then would go back and tune the numbers again. I won't claim this game has perfect balance, but I became confident that it was the game we wanted.

I know this game is simple and has a high proportion of chance. It's definitely the lightest game we've published to date — but watching everyone play and love the game has been so worth it.

Nate Jenne