Jaipur designer’s roll-and-write Corinth is Yspahan: The Dice Game in all but name

Jaipur and The River creator Sébastien Pauchon is joining the increasingly long list of designers with a roll-and-write game to their name.

Pauchon’s Corinth, due for release in March, involves chucking dice and sorting them into groups of the same result. Gold can be spent to roll extra yellow dice. Players then select a group of matching cubes and use them to perform actions such as delivering goods, purchasing resources and constructing buildings, all with the aim of amassing the most points.

As well as ticking off boxes representing stalls that offer points for fully completed sections, players can spend dice to move a steward around a five-by-five grid, avoiding crossing over their own path and gaining points and resources as they go.

If the central gameplay sounds familiar, it’s because it is. Corinth began life as Yspahan: The Dice Game, a spin-off to Pauchon’s 2006 game driven by the same group-drafting concept – and a strange title, given the original game already involved rolling dice.

Corinth, however, offers a slicked down version of the gameplay, with streamlined options for spending the dice and a playing time of up to half an hour – around half the length of Yspahan. It’s said to take around three minutes to learn. The player count remains the same: two to four people.

Days of Wonder, which published Pauchon’s The River last year, will be putting out Corinth, which will have an RRP of €20 in Europe.