Lords of Vegas Board Game Review

Year Published: 2010

Players: 2-4

Playing Time: 60-90 Minutes

A lot of times, board gamers conflate chaos with randomness. And in fairness to them, the end result can look similar.

I tend to delineate between them by defining chaos as that which is player-driven in a game. Randomness is game-driven.

If it’s not clear what I mean by that, a dice roll or card draw is random, but what a player will do on their turn is not. Both are unpredictable to an extent. The former can be estimated using probability, while the latter can be estimated using psychology or deduction.

That also means you can bargain or plead your case with someone else. Some games even give you explicit negotiation or trading tools to do this. Whereas you can’t bargain with a die.

Lords of Vegas has insane amounts of both of these qualities. Dice rolls will make or break your fortunes, but because the strategic decision space is so open and fluid, and gives you bargaining chips (sometimes literally) to manipulate the proceedings, you’ll rarely feel as though you’re out of contention.

Lords of Vegas – The Premise

You play as a real estate mogul along the Las Vegas strip, acquiring empty lots, building casinos on them, then reorganizing, remodeling and merging casinos in order to finish with the most influence in the town (victory points).

Money fuels all of this, which is related to payouts for casinos, usually from dice pips on a casino you own. But money in and of itself doesn’t get you points; here it’s merely a means to an end.

The game plays out with buildouts and expansions until pretty soon you’re bumping into one another’s casinos, and that’s when the game’s more cutthroat side starts to manifest. You’ll be taking over (and be taken over) at numerous points, vying for supremacy along the strip.

In all of this, luck plays a significant role. The types of casino cards that are drawn will affect payouts, dice can be rerolled to shuffle casino ownership, and you can even gamble at someone else’s casino to try to win a bit of cash from them. But it takes money to do any of this, so it’s not a free-for-all but rather a calculated series of risks, trying to strike at the right place and time.

Sandboxes in Board Games

I’ll invoke the concept of a sandbox sometimes when talking about a game’s mechanical system. Usually this is where there are only a handful of actions you can take, but myriad ways in which you can execute those actions in the shared space of the board.

In the early game, Lords of Vegas bounds your actions a bit in the form of the empty lots you own. Building casinos on them are logical early actions.

Soon, though, there are few – if any – corners of the board where you won’t have some sort of access. Sprawl into another lot, risking that it will be taken over later?

Redecorate (i.e. change the color of) your casino, and in doing so merge and take over a neighboring casino of the same color?

Or perhaps pay to reroll every die in the casino, hoping for larger payouts later on or even control over the casino?

By midgame, you’ll have enough money for perhaps 2-5 actions, but you’ll have a ton of options to consider, more than you’d ever be able to pay for.

The presence of luck can help to steer these decisions, though. Sure, maybe a big dice roll shafts you, and in those instances there’s very little you can do. But you can mitigate the chances of that happening by, say, solidifying your control over a particular casino. This will make others think twice about paying to reroll all of its dice, for instance, if you’re rerolling three dice and they’re only rolling one.

Other times it’s simply about getting the most from a plot before others swoop in and take it from you. You may not have it for long, but you may not need to keep it in order to give yourself some early momentum in the form of cash payouts or small point totals.

The system is extremely “open” though, which allows for some creative play. The dice will dictate a lot, but you’ll never feel devoid of options that could start to swing things back in your favor.

The Gambler’s Fallacy

One of the game’s actions is literally the same as playing the money line in Craps, but against another player (or rather, against their casino). There’s a popular variant where they can halve their exposure, sharing the risk with the bank, but the result is the same. Someone is losing money to someone else.

Here’s the thing, though: gambling is explicitly, mathematically worse for the gambler, just as it is in Vegas.

But you’ll still do it.

Why? Maybe because you’re only a couple dollars away from being able to take an important action, and you have the dream of a perfect turn stuck in your head and it’s too enticing to ignore. Maybe because you’re starting to feel the squeeze of desperation just tightly enough that you’re willing to take a bit more risk to try to mount a comeback.

Or maybe because it’s fun.

The frequency with which players take this action was initially a surprise to me. But then it sunk in that they were adopting the game’s premise to the point where it made perfect sense. One of my friends would even end his turn with perhaps a couple pointless dollars. Rather than keeping them toward some future action, he’d say “eh, I have this money, let’s go gambling.” Just because.

This action is indicative of a larger point about how the game’s mechanics integrate effortlessly with the theme, and how you’ll feel like a high-stakes gambler throughout.

It’s a brilliant integration of mechanics and theme, and brings a tone to the game that’s missing from a lot of strategy games, where the drama and emotional spikes the game generates are as important as the more tactical moments of strategic insight.

If You Have a Gambling Problem, Call Our Helpline

The picture I hope I’ve painted is not one for the faint of heart.

Your casinos will never be “yours” forever. The dice will screw you at multiple points in any reasonably competitive game.

Not only accepting these things but embracing them is part of the game’s fun.

Treating it like a high-stakes Craps table, but one in which you’re playing with “house money” (i.e. money that wasn’t originally yours) is probably the best way to experience Lords of Vegas.

You need to be able to roll with numerous punches, laughing them off as part of the fun, even as you angle yourself to try to come out on top.

Lords of Vegas – Conclusions

Lords of Vegas is a wide-open, cutthroat strategy game. It’s also extremely silly.

The emergent humor of its more dramatic moments can’t be understated. If you adopt this premise, the game’s many sharper edges will soften into something that’s amusing rather than frustrating. Even a couple self-proclaimed conflict-averse gamers have enjoyed this one at my table, because there are enough random swings that the proceedings never feel too personal.

Lower ratings for the game usually invoke the luck of it all, though. And this is unashamedly part of the game’s appeal. If that’s not for you, so be it.

What I enjoy most, though, is that the presence of loads of luck doesn’t negate your agency in the game. The system’s sandbox structure means that you’ll still feel like you have a say in the final outcome of the game. That say may be shared with Lady Luck, but she never fully wrests control away from the players, whose tactics and calculated risks play as large a role as the rolls more dictated by Fate.

The confluence of these aspects is heady and wonderful for me, and may be for you as well. So if you’re feeling lucky, maybe give these dice a roll.