Dicey Dungeons

I haven’t felt this ambivalent about a game in a long time.

Regular visitors to Renegade Creative Industries LTD. are aware we here at Renegade Creative Industries LTD are not genre purists, but deckbuilding is kind of my jam and the fact Dicey Dungeons is sold as a roguelike deckbuilder drives me slightly insane. Technically, it is!, but it’s missing my favorite mechanic: cycling through the deck each hand. You select your hand of cards, which is equivalent to equipping items and spells, prior to any given battle, and those cards are not changed throughout battle. This feels more like deck construction. My point is, the word “deckbuilder” in the blurb shouldn’t be a main selling point. If I bought this specifically to play a deckbuilder I would be disappointed.

So anyway, Dicey Dungeons is another tabletop-like wherein the player navigates a randomly generated dungeon and fights enemies, collects loot, and upgrades equipment. Card abilities are activated based on dice rolled, so you might have a weapon that allow attack (maximum 5) or a spell that allows you to heal, but you have to place snake eyes or something. I’ve had a dice manipulation itch here lately, and the irony of that is actual dice manipulation is (obviously) fiddly, and we at Renegade Creative Industries LTD. detest fiddliness in all forms, so an app implementation hits the spot without forcing the CEO to endure any tactile chicanery.

A lot of people talk about this game as if it’s Slay the Spire But Less, so I went into this one understanding there was a 50/50 chance it wasn’t for me. I was absolutely underwhelmed by this game at first, I felt like I would just determine the optimal action and repeat it every encounter. But players said the game really opens up after you unlock challenges, which requires playing through each dice character at least once (you don’t have to win), so I did that, and I found not only did the game get a lot more interesting with more complicated characters (I like the social media witch, who rolls to cast spells) but the challenges really do crack this thing wide open.

Challenges apply a rules change to each run. One run, I was always cursed. Another, status effects were changed and my special abilities were impacted. The curse thing was just annoying, but some of the other challenges can shake things up and require changing one’s strategy.

I went from low-key hating this game to being weirdly almost-but-not-quite addicted to it in an incredibly passive way. It’s hard to explain. But I have been slowly working through the challenges, doing a run here or there. RNG can and will screw up a run, so I’ve had a run where an early enemy laid me low for–frankly–no good reason except it rolled optimally and I rolled 1’s for like 4 turns. There are dice manipulators to be found (add 1, flip a die, etc.) you can try to pick up to mitigate this, but sometimes a run is just doomed and that’s all there is to it.

I read somewhere the developer intentionally avoided Slay the Spire while making this. Bluntly, I disagree with the sentiment–you can never NOT have enough exposure to video game mechanics as a developer. I think comparisons to StS are somewhat misguided, but agree with the broader consensus that DD isn’t as deep or compelling as the other, and if you’re under some sort of magical curse where you can only play one of these or risk pain of death you are probably gonna go with StS.

I also wanna add it’s funny this game has yet to be ported to mobile, because that seems like a no brainer. When I first started playing I felt it was particularly suited to mobile and I would actually prefer to play it on my phone or tablet.