After School Dice Club Is an Anime Series All about Tabletop Gaming

After School Dice Club is one of those series that seems to be breaking new ground in terms of what anime has done and where it’s been. As any anime fan knows, this is no easy task: at this point, there seems to be an anime related to just about anything you could imagine. But while I’ve seen anime series that have video games as their focus, such as the superpopular Sword Art Online and the lesser-known Gamers!, I’d yet to see one that took a deep dive into the world of tabletop gaming—until now.

Funimation

The show is brand new; it’s still airing in Japan, with dubbed English episodes becoming available pretty quickly after the Japanese air date. As of this writing, there are 10 episodes available for US viewers, and it appears there will be 12 episodes total for the first season. Because of this, I won’t share as many conclusive thoughts on the series as I might in a full-series review, since I can’t get a bird’s-eye view of it just yet. However, for the moment, I’m looking forward to seeing where the series will lead.

The protagonist of the series is Miki Takekasa, a high school student who recently moved to Kyoto with her family and is starting at a new all-girls school. Miki is very timid and anxious by nature, and the move has hindered her self-confidence still further. But things begin to change in the first episode when she meets her classmate Aya Takayashiki, a happy-go-lucky girl who’s always out to find the next adventure. She takes Miki under her wing and immediately begins bringing her along for whatever new thing she’s up to. Though Miki is afraid at first, she soon finds that new things aren’t always scary, and that oftentimes, they can be lots of fun.

One of Aya and Miki’s first adventures together takes them to a local gaming store that neither of them have heard of before. In fact, neither have heard much about board games at all before stumbling upon the shop. But after learning one of the fun new games the shop has to offer, they’re hooked—so much so that they join (you guessed it) a gaming club that meets at the store after school.

The format of the series is, admittedly, a little formulaic. Each episode has the main characters going through their school day, with something of note occurring to move the plot along, but then quickly moves to the latest board game the characters are learning. As the characters learn how to play the game, so do the viewers—the instructions don’t necessarily go into enough detail for viewers to go play the game right afterward without reading the directions, but enough to give them a good sense of how the game works. Afterward, we get to see the characters play a round or two of the new game.

One interesting feature is that the theme of the latest game tends to tie in somehow to what the characters are learning in their real lives that week, and the characters then have a chance to put the concept they learn from the game (such as the value in taking a calculated risk in hopes that it will pay off, or the importance of good communication) into practice in real life shortly thereafter. I found this satisfying to watch, if a bit predictable.

Overall, I’d say I’ll give this series a solid “It’s decent” thus far. It’s an entertaining one to watch, but I don’t feel particularly grabbed by it yet (as fun as I find it when I can recognize games I’ve seen or played, both on the shelves of the gaming store and on the characters’ table). At this point, I’m not sure I have the demographic for this series fully pegged, but I think it’ll appeal both to people who are totally new to the board-gaming world but are interested to learn more about it and to more seasoned gamers who are interested to learn about games that are new to them, or just see a session of a game they already love played out on screen. (For what it’s worth, my husband, who is about as experienced a gamer as anyone I know, is absolutely delighted by it.) Though I can’t count this series among my favorites, I’m finding it genuinely enjoyable, and I will definitely keep watching to see what game the characters will try out next.