Phase 10 - Ravensberger dice game

We have played a game of Phase 10, purchased for $15 at the game store in the Station Arcade in Adelaide's town centre. It is a simple dice rolling game where players take turns to make sequences of rolls of up to 10 dice (specially marked), generally attempting to make triplets, quadruplets and runs of numbers according to the requirements of the 'phase' they are in. The game contains a neat sturdy box, rules (not that easy to understand unless you like rules), a scorepad and ten dice. The dice are six sided, but contain numbers from 1 to 10 in different colours, and a number of 'W' faces which count as 'wild' scores).

There are ten phases in the game. Players take turns to try and roll a specified 'pattern' (eg three of a kind and a run of four consecutive numbers) in a total of three rolls of the dice before they hand the dice to the next player.

In the first and second rolls, the player chooses which (if any) dice they just rolled that they will roll again. A player can choose to leave some of the dice as they are, and use the face showing on these dice to count in their subsequent this turn. They must take the result of the third roll as final. If they don't make their Phase requirement (eg. seven consecutive numbers) for the phase they are in, play passes to the next player.If they make the requirement, they score each of the dice which is in the winning combination ...

... and record it.

When one player completes Phase 10, remaining players can try and pass through the remaining phases. They get three rolls as usual, per phase. If they don't make the requirement, they stop rolling and their game is over. If they make the phase requirement, they have three rolls at the next phase. This continues until they either complete Phase 10 or bomb out. The winner is the player on Phase 10 who has the most points.

Opinion: originally I was sceptical about a pure dice game. The game sucks you in, however, making choices about which dice to leave, which to reroll, which patterns to go for thereby, when to effectively surrender a turn to try for a better score, etc. In other words, you're mainly playing against yourself.

The game is produced by Ravensberger in the Czech Republic. Does that make it a "Eurogame"?

By the way, Jessica won.