Fire & Dice is Kotaku’s Gaming App of the Day! Many thanks to Stephen Totilo. This is many of our guys’ first real press exposure, so they are significantly thrilled. Here’s some favorable excerpts:

“[I]t’s good.”

Should I stop there? Nah:

“It is a strategy game complicated by lucky and unlucky dice rolls, a mix of intention and happenstance that makes games like Angry Birds and Peggleso much fun, too.”

I’ve never courted being compared to Angry Birds, but I’ll take it if it isn’t meant as an epithet.

“To describe Fire and Dice as a game of, well, putting out fires with dice, makes it sound strange. But the systems and style of play work well. It all makes a lot of sense when you play and feels fresh and right for a phone game. [...] It’s an odd idea, well executed.”

Version 3.0 is out on iOS and Android. 3.0.1 will be incoming (There’s always a bug you miss…)

Education is boss and I dig what I do, but I’ve also missed actually making games. Luckily, there’s a neat little startup about fifteen miles down the road from me called Sky Parlor Studios that needed some help crafting a portfolio of mobile games. We are working on a number of things but the first to release is called Fire and Dice. It’s one of my favorite games I’ve designed in many years, so I do want to tell you a bit about it.

Fire and Dice has a number of inspirations, notably the board games Roll Through the Ages and Elder Sign where the player takes random resources and assign them in a Yahtzee meets Sim/RPG kind of way.

In Fire and Dice, you play as the fire chief of Sparksville, which is a town of sixteen blocks that seems to have trouble avoiding combusting. You roll your dice and choose to lock in water, movement, rescue or truck dice to drive around the town, put out the fires and rescue the citizens.

Small fires take five water to quench; large fires take ten. If two large fires are next to each other, they will spread. But having two trucks at a location will double your water efficiency (spend 5 instead of 10 to quench the large fires). Having three trucks at a location will triple it.

Rescuing a citizen and returning them to the fire station awards you a new die (up to seven), which is key to long-term survival.

Here’s my strategy, but I don’t have the score, so take it with a grain of salt: get to seven dice as soon as possible, then expand your truck fleet and make sure there are never two large fires next to each other. Easier said than done. Do you bunch your trucks together for the efficiency bonus or do you spread them out to cover a larger area? It’s a catchy game and I wouldn’t sell it so hard if I didn’t think it was a lot of fun.

The Ad-Supported Android version is on the marketplace now. The Paid Android ($2) as well. Paid iPhone, Free iPhone and iPad Universal apps are all forthcoming. There are more features and tweaks we are rushing to add, but we wanted to get this in front of folks as soon as possible.

We put a lot of love into the game, so we would appreciate if you purchased one of these for the mobile device of your choice and supported original indie development. We’ve got a bunch of good ideas in the pipeline and want to be able to afford to come out with something fun every month or so. Use the comments if you have questions or suggestions and I’ll get to them as soon as I can. I’ll keep this post updated with news and screenshots.