So last night I decided to give the new iphone / ipod app from Fantasy Flight Games a try in our Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (WFRP) session.

Its called the WFRP Toolkit and acts as a virtual tray that you use to roll virtual dice for your checks.

After the annoying & un-skippable WFRP, FFG and Games Workshop logos have finally decide to bugger off your left at the front screen which has a nice graphic at the top and a current news section from FFG. Now I could go into the whole issue of “Why do I have to look at ads, I have paid for the app and WAAaaa WAAaa WAAaa”, but being a FFG fan I feel its a great little feature and every time it loads I excited to check it to see what’s new.

What can I say, FFG has part of my soul in their back pocked along with my pay packet.

So prodding the start button that rotates the screen and a virtual dice tray is presented with a nice chaos symbol etched onto the background. Along the top of the tray is a small bar containing the Characteristic (blue), Conservative (green), Reckless (red) and Skill (yellow) dice. Touching any of these makes the dice pop off the bar and appear in the tray in the centre of the screen. You can tap on the dice in the bar multiple times for more of the same dice. Swiping a finger across the bar makes it slide off the screen and another bar appears with the Challenge (purple), Misfortune (black) and Fortune (white) dice. These can then be added to the virtual tray in the same manner as the other dice.

Across the bottom of the screen is another bar containing a large red cross to remove dice from the pool, a reverse selected dice button and the menu button.

To roll the dice just a quick shake of the ipod set the dice dancing in tray with some very satisfying dice on wood sound effects. Now at this point last night I had not told the guys that I was using the ipod to roll the dice just in case the app was not as good as I hoped. With the sound effects off and being a bit shifty I got a couple of strange looks as I started jiggling behind the GM screen and had to explain very quickly what I was up to. OK FFG please for the next version can we have a option for a button to roll the dice as I quickly got frustrated with the snigger’s from the other players.

When the dice start to roll both the top and bottom bars retract to give the full view of the tray and reading the dice is exactly like checking for successes with the real dice. A nice feature is that you tap the screen with two fingers it will bring up a summary of the dice rolled which I found a lot easier to read than counting the symbols. This is a brilliant idea! When you are the GM and have to read the dice it can be like reading tea leaves, it takes a while and sometimes its not clear , but with the summary screen it obvious and it speed up your turn, getting your focus back into the game. The summary screen also gives you the chance to save the dice roll to the log or to see the results of only selected dice.

Holding one finger on the screen for a few seconds brings the dice and option bars back onto the screen to make a new dice pool or add more dice.

Under the menu screen you have a log page to see what dice rolls have been saved along with a page of statistics. There is a option screen allowing you to clear the dice roll logs, turn off the sounds / shadows, turn off the FFG Movie that displays when the app first launches (to be replaced by the FFG logo!…?). A page to read the instruction manual and the credits for the app are also available.

All in all I love this app. I think that for the cost of £1.79 it’s a bargain and cheaper than having to buy a load more dice.

One of my issues with the new dice mechanic of WFRP is having to reach over the GM screen to retrieve dice scattered all over the table. This App lets the players use the core set dice and I don’t have to bother looking all over for those elusive purple dice which I’m sure the players hide.

So is this App worth the £1.79 asking price?

Oh Yes! Especially if you are the GM. Though I must admit I will miss rolling that two hands worth of dice.

P.S.    The gaming session was wicked last night and there was a brilliant twist in the story that I set up but the players executed. I love roleplaying sometimes!