You are a die. You are a warrior. You are a warrior who’s been turned into a die by a malevolent goddess and forced to compete on a game show. If you make it out of this thing alive, you can have anything you desire. In your case, that means you’ll win a jet ski.
The narrative that frames Terry Cavanagh’s Dicey Dungeons is more than a little silly, but its flippant charm masks a surprisingly deep experience. That’s typical of a Cavanagh game. He’s the creator of VVVVVV and Super Hexagon, both of which took simple concepts and blew them out into byzantine tests of planning and reflexes.
Dicey Dungeons is a cross between a roguelike and a deck-builder, something you can pick up and play through several times in the span of half an hour, yet involving enough to devour entire evenings. “I wanted to make my own deck-builder,” Cavanagh says. “I’ve been interested in that genre for a long time. I decided to add dice to it to try to push it in a different direction.”
The name roughly explains what you do in the game. You fight your way through dungeons in turn-based battles, against space marines and alarmingly buff snowmen, which require you to use six-sided dice rolls in increasingly inventive ways.
Each turn begins with a roll. You’ve got numbers to work with, and you’ve got moves you can plug those numbers into. Sometimes you won’t have the right numbers for the right moves, and that’s when the game gets interesting. You can protect yourself this turn, but won’t be able to attack. You had planned to poison your enemy, but you’re going to have to slash them with your sword instead. You make the best of your roll — or you screw up and discover a fresh strategy in the process.
As you progress through a run, you pick up new abilities and items that have you layering various attacking and defensive maneuvers on top of each other. Your combatants grow more powerful and you start thinking a move or two ahead. Your eyes widen with anticipation just before each turn’s dice roll floats up onto the screen.
“The key thing that’s going on in the game,” Cavanagh says, “is that there’s this core simple set of mechanics, and it’s elaborated on in as many different ways as I could think of.”
Cavanagh has obviously stretched his mind in dreaming up the game’s six playable characters, each of whom play uniquely. “The robot, for instance, doesn’t roll dice,” he says. “They have a way to summon dice into the field, but they have an upper limit that if they go over, they lose all their equipment. So it’s kind of like a game of blackjack.”
The thief is another interesting option. They can split dice to attack more times per turn and use enemy abilities as if they were their own. Some characters are more difficult to use than others, but because playthroughs are brief and restarting is easy, figuring out their peculiar strengths through trial and error is more fun than frustrating.
As with many roguelikes, this is how Dicey Dungeons reveals itself. “It’s got permadeath. It’s a rough life,” Cavanagh says. But he also nods toward death as an educational experience. “As you play the game over and over again you get to know the enemies, what they can do and how to make a build that can counter them.”
The experience comes together as you acquire a fuller knowledge of the character you’re controlling, facing off against now-familiar foes. You’ve got a solid arsenal of weapons and abilities. You know what the buff snowman is going to throw at you. The tension is provided by the roll you’re about to receive in this next turn. It doesn’t decide everything, but you’re hoping for one outcome more than any other. Fingers crossed for a six and a four.