Resolving dice, especially dice showing damage, suffers from the confusion of the shortcut. Players learn the dice resolution of scooping up a bunch of dice and saying, “Deal [dice total] to that character.” While this is fine most of the time, there are certain situations where rules confusion occurs because it’s not the technically accurate way to resolve dice. Learning the correct way to resolve dice goes a long way to helping new players reason their way out of confusing situations.
If the below explanation is too detailed for you, the TL;DR version of this process is:
- Choose resolve dice, including symbol to resolve, as your action.
- Locate a resolvable die in your pool and resolve it. Just one (with any modifiers).
- Look around your dice pool. Do you see a resolvable (non-modifier) die with that symbol that you want to resolve? If yes, resolve it (plus any modifiers) and repeat Step 3. If no, end your action.
Detailed Dice Resolution Breakdown
- Your action begins. There are only six things you can choose for your action. For our purposes, we are choosing the “Resolve dice” action. As an additional part of choosing to resolve dice, you also choose the symbol you wish to resolve.
- Now that you’ve chosen the dice symbol you’re resolving, take a peek at all the dice you have in your dice pool and locate a resolvable die showing the symbol you’ve chosen. In the example below, we are going to choose the 1R ranged damage side on the left and resolve it. Dude on the other team takes a single pew-pew to the face and we return the First Order Stormtrooper die to its card.
- Once that die is resolved, anything on the board that cares about that pew-pew does its thing. You’ll know these cards by the term “After” on them. A number of these exist in the game, but I expect that if you’re playing them, you know what it is. The point is that you resolve a single die (plus any blue side + modifiers you attached to it) and then pause your turn for things that care about that die being resolved to do their thing.
- Now that we’ve completed that, we go back to our dice pool and look around for any more dice showing the same symbol we chose. There’s one there, do you see it? The First Order Stormtrooper die on 2 Ranged damage for 1. You can choose to resolve that one or not. If you choose not to resolve it, your action is over. If you do choose to resolve it, do so and then jump up to the bullet point above this one. Basically, we are in a loop where you are resolving one die (plus modifiers) of your chosen symbol at a time until we either run out of dice showing the symbol we chose or decide we don’t want to resolve anymore.
Here’s another example that shows off Focus chaining. Here is our Dice Pool.
We choose to resolve Focus dice. Using the Sentinel Messenger, we focus the Watt Tambor die to a 2 Focus side leaving us with this dice pool.
Now that we’ve resolved a focus side, look around to see if there are any more focus sides to resolve. The game does not care whether the die started out on that side, only what is on that side right now. In this case we’re going to choose to keep going and resolve that 2F side to get MAXIMUM DAMAGE!
Now that we’re out of Focus sides we are done with this action. That’s a pretty dice pool for next turn, though, isn’t it? Don’t worry, they don’t have any dice removal. This is going to blast someone with five pew-pews.