Dicey Dungeons Progress Update, AKA “So That’s Why They Call It Dicey”

Last week I wrote about my initial experiences with Dicey Dungeons, a roguelite turn-based RPG where you use dice to execute moves in combat against your opponents. At the time I had only experienced two runs: one as the standard warrior class and one as the trickier thief class. Since that time I have made a lot of progress in the game. I’ve unlocked three more character types – the robot, the inventor, and the witch – as well as completing multiple episodes, or harder challenges, with the warrior and thief. I’ve learned a lot more about Dicey Dungeons during that time so it seems that now is a good time to share some of my latest thoughts on what the game has to offer.

New Characters

I talked a little bit about my early impressions of the warrior and the thief classes last time, but since then I have tried out three new classes. Dicey Dungeon does a pretty good job of making classes feel distinct by giving them unique gear or completely changing essential mechanics of the game depending on the character you are playing. This makes runs feel unique depending on what character you are running, which is a quality about the game that I deeply appreciate. Naturally though, some characters work better for me than others, so let’s discuss the characters I’ve been playing with recently and what challenges they bring to the table.

The Robot

The robot was my first new character after my last article and has a higher difficulty level than either the warrior or the thief. The reason for this added difficulty is because the robot completely alters how your dice rolls work. The other two characters start with a certain number of dice and slowly gain more dice as they increase in level. The robot instead has a dice capacity based not on the number of dice but the values on the dice. You roll a dice by clicking ZR (I’m playing on Switch), and that dice adds its value to the total of your computation. When you’ve rolled more value than what the robot’s CPU storage can hold, all of your equipment is disabled and you can no longer take any actions. However, if you manage to roll exactly the right amount, you get a jackpot that allows you to do bonus damage, heal, or roll one last time for free. The robot’s limit break guarantees a jackpot, giving you a random combination of dice whose values satisfy the storage requirements exactly.

Typically with the warrior and the thief, you know exactly what dice you are working with from the beginning. You can use your equipment and abilities to adjust those dice and then make a decision about how to use them once all of your values are locked in. With the robot, each time you roll where a six could exceed your storage is a risk of locking yourself out of any future actions. This means that the robot requires a balance of risk versus reward – do I settle for the dice I have or risk taking no action in favor of getting a dice that would be even better? This mechanic creates an interesting challenge that makes play with the robot feel really distinct from any other character. I don’t prefer it to the normal mechanics but it’s fun to experience intermittently as a change of pace.

The Inventor

The first lady dice added to the bunch, the inventor is the level four difficulty character for Dicey Dungeons. Unlike the robot she doesn’t mess with the way that dice rolling works; instead, what makes her more difficult is the way her unique ability interfaces with your equipment. The inventor begins her first battle with a gadget that can be used for free and has a unique effect. At the end of the battle, she gets bored of her gadget and uses one of her pieces of equipment to make a new one. You get a maximum of three options based on the gear you currently have equipped, and the equipment you choose is permanently lost as it becomes a new gadget that you can only use for the very next battle.

Constantly cycling equipment adds a lot of kinks to your normal approach to Dicey Dungeons. Upgrades feel less valuable because you are less likely to keep any one specific piece of gear throughout the run. Gadgets can only be made from what you have equipped, so pieces of equipment you consider disposable have to be in your active inventory if you want to get rid of them. And you don’t choose which equipment is going to end up in the gadget pool, so if you end up pulling three pieces of gear that you really like, the choice of what to sacrifice can really be painful. The inventor challenges you to constantly adjust your strategy and gear, preventing you from ever getting too comfortable with one set of equipment that you use to power through any given encounter. The inventor was initially very off-putting to me for this reason, but I think more than the other new characters she has been the one who has grown on me the most so far.

The Witch

The final new character I unlocked was the witch, an influencer and the five-star difficulty character class for the game. What makes the witch difficult compared to the characters who precede her? It’s all about her spellbook. Most characters have equipment that is activated by slotting dice into it. You put a six into a sword and do six damage. The witch has to memorize spells from her spellbook first. The spellbook has six slots that are each assigned to a specific dice value. So say you have the magic missile spell, which does five damage when an even dice is placed into it, in slot three. You have to roll a three to equip magic missile to one of your spell slots. This means that what specific spells you have access to at any given time are dependent on the dice you roll. You can only have four memorized spells at any given time, so you have to manage which ones you want to be active at any given moment based on the circumstances of the fight.

The spellbook’s functionality also changes how other fundamentals work as a result. You can’t upgrade spells normally; instead, you have to use your level-up bonus to turn some of your memorized spell slots into “upgrade slots” which cause the spell to be stronger when placed there. You don’t have an equipment bag for holding extra gear, so each time you get an opportunity to memorize a new spell you either have to accept it into your spellbook or commit to not accepting that spell at all. Managing the spellbook adds a lot more layers to the type of strategic decisions you are making during a run, which makes the witch a complicated character to play. I’ve won her basic episode but I’ve struggled to find strategies with her that truly mesh with the playstyle I bring to the game.

New Episodes

Once you’ve won a run with four of the game’s six characters, you unlock the ability to play new episodes with the characters you already have. Episodes can be thought of as difficulty levels unique to a specific character. Unlike other roguelikes where you might have generalized difficulty modifiers that you turn up between runs, each character in Dicey Dungeons has customized challenges to try and overcome based around their core mechanics. I really like this approach to increasing the difficulty because it challenges you to experiment within the confines of each character type, and it makes doing the harder runs feel more unique. At this point while I have attempted at least one harder episode for every character type, the ones I have really been focusing on are the warrior and the thief, the characters I had already tried when I first wrote about the game.

Warrior Episodes

The warrior episodes I have done so far are episodes 2 and 3: Curse of Greed and Worse Than a Curse, respectively. Curse of Greed seems like a pretty good deal on first blush – you get two upgraded battle axes at the start and every time you find new equipment, that equipment is upgraded already! The downside is that you always start each turn with the “cursed” status – there’s a 50% chance that whatever gear you try to use will fail to resolve its effect and be spent for the turn, along with the dice you loaded into it. This requires you to hedge your bets by trying to burn actions you care less about resolving so that your most important actions can go through safely. It’s just enough additional challenge, plus the automatic upgrades on all equipment is a really nice feature.

Worse Than a Curse is a much more difficult episode to navigate as it adds a terrible cost to leveling up – it reduces instead of increases your max HP. To mitigate this penalty, your starting gear is a weapon which heals some of your HP when you attack with a six. The difficulty here is in finding a balance of leveling up to increase your resources – particularly dice – but not leveling up so much that your health becomes a serious issue. I found it useful to use more defensive equipment than I would normally run to help mitigate the amount of damage that my low health bar was experiencing. This was a good challenge for me because it was the kind of challenge that forced me to change my strategy and experiment with new gear that I didn’t typically use when playing the warrior.

Thief Episodes

The thief has been my favorite character to play in Dicey Dungeons. (Not a particularly impressive insight as thieves tend to be my favorite in pretty much everything.) Not only do I find the most effective strategy for the thief to be a relatively simple one to pull off, but the most satisfying to execute in terms of gamefeel – loading up the dagger with a dozen or so dice right in a row and watching the enemy’s health bar get decimated is really satisfying! The thief is the only character with whom I have currently completed a fourth episode. Every character’s episode four – Elimination Round – is a more difficult version of the base mechanics where enemies have improved health and upgraded gear, making them sturdier and more dangerous. I powered through that challenge by loading up on lockpicks, upgrading my dagger and hacksaw, and then breaking all my 1s into additional 1s in order to stack immense amounts of damage with the dagger’s +1 bonus.

The thief’s episode two is called Finders Keepers and it changes how the unique ability and limit break work for the thief. Normally, the thief can use one random piece of equipment from the enemy each turn. Finders Keepers make it so that instead, you can permanently steal a piece of equipment from the enemy at the end of the battle. This allows you to permanently scoop up new gear from foes, but you don’t get that gear for free the way the thief normally would. It also changes your limit break so that instead of rolling a handful of 1s, you can reuse a piece of equipment one time. It’s an interesting alteration of the thief’s stealing ability that also plays against the easiest effective strategy with that character, challenging you to experiment with new equipment and options.

I’m having a lot of fun with Dicey Dungeons and the unique, character-based challenges it brings to the table. The fact that every character functions differently and each episode has unique rules keeps the experience fresh. It’s not as rogue-like (ha!) as I would normally look for in this sort of game but I find that the areas where Dicey Dungeons excels really help it to stand out among its peers. If you’ve played the game and have your own observations about characters or episodes that you’d like to share, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!