Two Rex Plays #15 - Dicey Dungeons
In this edition of Two Rex Plays we’re discussing Dicey Dungeons, a digital worker placement, deck building, dungeon crawler. Choose from one of six anthropomorphised dice avatars and battle your way through a battle your way through an eclectic cast of enemies in a procedurally generated dungeon to face off against the final boss.
Here are the design features we enjoyed:
Meaningful replay - Once you complete the vanilla game with the initial dice, you unlock a further 5 characters, all of which have substantial differences in the way they operate which means you’ll need to adapt your tactics. For each of the characters, there are also 5 variants on the base game where you’re challenged to beat the dungeon with a change to the rule set that requires you to adapt your style of play.
Asymmetry - Each of the dice avatars are notably different from one another. The starter dice (the warrior) is the most traditional - you equip weapons and armour that need certain dice rolls to activate, and you have full autonomy over your setup. The next dice you’ll unlock is the thief - their thematically appropriate difference is that at the start of each battle they will steal an item of equipment from the enemy. That means you need to adapt on the fly to each battle giving this character a significantly different feel. The rest of the dice are equally varied in their approach.
Flexibility & Surprises - I’ll try not to spoil anything, but the game’s flexibility allows a lot of interchange between the enemies’ equipment and your own. As well as being a generally interesting concept, the designers play with this idea in a clever way so that one encounter doesn’t bear out the way you’d expect. It was fun to stumble on this when it happened.
Micro sessions – I played this on the Switch, but it’s also available on mobile devices where the bite size battles make it perfect for playing in small chunks during the commute. The deck builder component is relatively light (on most builds you’re likely to only have 4 or 5 pieces of equipment actively in use), so if you’re coming back to a game after a few hours away it’s easy to pick up where you left off.
Achievements museum - I’m a sucker for achievements/ trophies in general, but I particularly like it when there’s some sort of reward linked to the accomplishment. In this case you unlock some character art and a bio for each of the enemies you’ll find in the dungeons.
On the spectrum of board games and video games, dicey dungeons sits somewhere in the intersection where neither medium is obviously preferred over the other. You can see a slightly different version of dicey dungeons existing in physical board game form, and it seems clearly inspired by mechanisms that are commonplace in that format. That leads to an interesting design question - what would have to change to make this a board game rather than a video game? I imagine speed of setup is one of the first items on the list, with individual battles becoming longer (and therefore less infrequent) so that the balance of game admin to play time remains acceptable. But beyond that, much of the game maps directly into a physical incarnation.
Interested in dicey dungeons, find out more here:
Blog from designer Terry Cavanagh
http://distractionware.com/blog/
Gamespot Review
https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/dicey-dungeons-review/1900-6417267/
Wikipedia Page