Dicey Dungeons

Dicey Dungeons is a roguelike game where you battle enemies by dealing out dice values over pieces of equipment. The fights are one-on-one encounters in which the dice you roll should match certain conditions for being assigned to attack, shield or reroll options. As with most roguelikes, the run immediately ends if your HP reaches zero. Dicey Dungeons is a dungeon crawler that doesn’t rely on pure combat gameplay, but rather on brain power and luck.

The narrative of Dicey Dungeons is framed around a game show that entraps its contestants. The show is hosted by Lady Luck, the wicked Goddess of Fortune, who offers a chance to fulfil the characters’ deepest wishes—that is, if they manage to get to the end of the dungeons. There are six playable characters, and they all have their own mechanical theme. The Warrior, a good starting character for new players, has straightforward skills which focus on dealing damage. Other characters are unlocked after a few runs, with more and more complex abilities. For instance, the Robot behaves like a blackjack machine, providing new dice on command, but ultimately overloading if the sum value goes over a threshold.

The fights are dice-fueled turn-based encounters. Every turn starts with the player rolling multiple dice, whose values can then be slotted into equipment cards with various abilities. Some equipments have dice requirements for activation, such as inflicting damage only on even values. They might also have a bonus perk, such as adding poison damage when a six is used. The enemy and the player character take turns using their dice on equipment until one runs out of HP. Each foe’s abilities and weaknesses are made explicit, and they usually correlate with the colorful and quirky art; for instance, there’s a marshmallow enemy that can burn some of your dice, requiring you to sacrifice a few HP in order to use them.

As your character makes their way down the six dungeon floors, they will come across familiar staples of the roguelike genre: upgrade shops, level-ups, apples for regaining health, treasure chests with new equipment… The number of cards which can be equipped for a fight are limited, but all pieces of equipment are kept in a backpack, and the active ones can be changed between fights. There is a deck-building dimension to Dicey Dungeons, as collecting a strong and cohesive set of equipment is key to completing the most difficult runs.

Furthering the theme of the game show, each character’s arc is split across “episodes”, which are playthroughs run under specific constraints. For instance, in one of the Robot challenges, all duplicate dice are immediately dropped. There are six episodes per character (yes, there’s a pattern), and they increase in difficulty as the player progresses.

Dicey Dungeons can be tense because of its roguelike gameplay. When the player dies, they have to start the episode all over again, losing their carefully crafted equipment in the process. The game requires to think about probabilities and leverage synergies from the equipment at hand. Dicey Dungeons is a mix of both chance and skill, though it might skew one way or the other, depending on which hero you’ll take through Lady Luck’s trials.

This description was written by Cay Macres and edited by Oriane Tury.