I got curious and did the math myself. I think I’ve found a way to adapt Star Crossed to dice pools.
Long story short: instead of pulling dice from a jenga tower, you roll the dice pool. The dice pool start with 5d6 in the pool.
Every time you roll, if you roll one or two 6s, add a d6 to the pool. If you roll three or four 6s, add 2d6 to the pool. If you roll five 6s, treat it like the the tower falling.
By default, games of Star Crossed can involve pulling between 0 and 36 blocks from a tower. Most games will involve pulling 15-22.
With this dicepool mechanic, you have ~60% chance of completing 15 moves and ~10% change of completing 22 moves. This seems to be more or less in keeping with typical games of Jenga
I’ll need some playtesting to confirm, but this seems workable.
Features of this Dicepool
The chance of rolling 5 6’s accelerates, which seems appropriate given how it becomes increasingly difficult to pull blocks from a Jenga tower
Drawbacks of this Dicepool
You may end up rolling upwards of 20d6, but this hack is intended for online play and dice roller sites can handle that (https://rolz.org/ allows you to quickly roll a large number of dice and count the 6s if you just type in #D6E6)
If you’re curious, here’s how I came to this conclusions:
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Over the course of a game of Star Crossed, you go through 8 scenes. It is possible to complete all 8 scenes and end the game without knocking over the tower, but the game appears to be designed to generally end with the tower falling.
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That suggests I should make a dice pool mechanic that will likely ‘fall’ before the completion of all 8 scenes. So, I tried to figure out roughly how many blocks are pulled from the tower over the course of a typical game of Star Crossed
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Star Crossed allows players to pull 36 blocks maximum. However, you could technically complete an entire game without ever pulling a block from the tower, but seems against the spirit of the game.
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It seems more likely that each player will pull ~1 block from the tower per scene. With 2 players and 8 scenes, most games will probably pull 16-ish blocks on the low end.
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That gives a likely range of 16-36 moves per game. Totals closer to 16 seem more likely than totals closer to 36
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Coincidentally, anecdotes suggest that regular games of Jenga tend to end after 15-30 moves, usually after ~22.
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I fiddled around with dice pools and statistics until I found mechanics that made the dicepools statistically likely to ‘fall’ between 16 and 22 rolls in.
Let me know if anyone has questions, comments, advice, etc…
