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I've spent twenty years watching roguelikes bolt random mechanics onto tired formulas. Then Terry Cavanagh turns dice into a legitimate strategic system and I'm furious that it actually works.
Paul
March 3, 2026
8.8
Overall Score
"I went into Dicey Dungeons ready to write another rant about roguelikes that mistake randomness for strategy."
Let me be clear about something: I hate dice. I've hated dice since every tabletop RPG session ended with someone blaming their bad rolls instead of their bad decisions. Dice are the refuge of lazy game designers who want 'replay value' without putting in actual work. So when I saw Dicey Dungeons was about being a literal walking die fighting through procedurally generated dungeons, I loaded it up specifically to roast it. Then the tutorial ended and I realized Terry Cavanagh had somehow made dice into actual strategic resources instead of random number vomit. You roll your dice pool each turn and slot them into equipment with specific requirements. A sword needs any die. A bow needs evens. A spell might need a five or higher. Suddenly I'm not praying to RNG gods, I'm managing a hand of resources and making meaningful decisions about what to use where. This is what dice combat should have been doing for the last thirty years.
The Warrior is your baseline dice-slotter. Fine. Expected. Then you unlock the Thief who steals a random piece of enemy equipment every turn and has to figure out how to use whatever garbage she yoinks. The Robot plays blackjack to generate dice, gambling on whether to hit or stand for more resources. The Inventor has to destroy her own equipment after fights to craft new gear from the parts. Each character isn't just a different sprite with tweaked numbers, they're fundamentally different gameplay systems. The Jester randomly transforms dice values and equipment every turn, forcing pure adaptation. The Witch uses spells that upgrade based on specific dice combinations. I genuinely enjoyed learning all six classes, which hasn't happened since I was young enough to have free time. Even better, each character has multiple episodes that completely change their rules. The Warrior's later episodes add countdown timers, limit rerolls, or flip the entire combat system. It's not just harder difficulties, it's remixed rulesets that make you rethink everything you learned.
Here's where Dicey Dungeons does something quietly brilliant that most roguelikes are too cowardly to attempt. Instead of endless randomized runs until you stumble into a winning build, it's organized into discrete episodes with curated challenges. Each episode takes thirty to sixty minutes. You see the full arc of your character's power growth. You face a final boss that actually feels like a conclusion instead of just another floor. Then it's over and you can move on or try a different episode. This is the opposite of every roguelike that's tried to waste infinite hours of my life with 'just one more run' psychology. Dicey Dungeons says 'here's a complete experience, now here's another complete experience with different rules.' The procedural generation keeps individual runs fresh, but the episode structure means you're progressing through actual content instead of grinding the same seventeen floors forever. I cannot overstate how much more I respect this approach. It treats my time like it has value, which is a novel concept in this genre.
Chipzel's soundtrack is the kind of aggressively upbeat chiptune that burrows into your brain and refuses to leave. I've been humming boss fight music for three days. This is biological warfare. Marlowe Dobbe's art style is so cheerful and colorful that it makes me angry. Vacuum cleaners shouldn't be cute. Irish mythology creatures shouldn't have big friendly eyes. Everything is so visually cohesive and immediately readable that I can't even complain about UI clarity. The animations are snappy, the feedback is instant, the whole presentation feels like it was made by people who actually care about game feel instead of just shipping functional garbage. Lady Luck as the villain works because she's got that perfect game show host energy, all fake enthusiasm and barely concealed contempt for contestants. The writing is light but lands its jokes. The whole aesthetic package comes together so well that it makes every asset flip roguelike look even worse by comparison.
The equipment system is where this whole thing clicks into place. You're not collecting generic stat upgrades, you're building a dice engine. A piece of gear might duplicate a die's value. Another might let you add or subtract from a roll. Some equipment activates when you use specific numbers, creating combo chains. You start seeing synergies between items, planning out your turn order to maximize dice efficiency. It's deckbuilding roguelike strategy except instead of playing cards from your hand, you're allocating dice rolls to equipment slots. The genius move is that bad rolls aren't automatic failures. A one isn't useless if you've got equipment that wants low numbers or can manipulate dice values. The strategic depth comes from building a loadout that can handle whatever your dice give you, not from praying for sixes. Enemy design supports this by giving monsters their own dice-based mechanics. You're not just managing your own resources, you're predicting what the enemy can do with their rolls and planning accordingly. Boss fights become these beautiful puzzles where you're racing against their dice engine while managing your own.
The later episodes can get genuinely punishing in ways that feel more frustrating than challenging. Some rule modifiers just feel bad instead of interesting. A few character/episode combinations rely too heavily on getting lucky with equipment drops early. The difficulty curve isn't always smooth. Sometimes you steamroll, sometimes you get destroyed by floor three because the shop didn't offer anything useful. The game doesn't explain some of the more complex interactions clearly enough. I had to learn through trial and error that certain equipment effects don't stack the way I expected. The final final bonus content after you've cleared everything gets extremely hard in ways that feel more like arbitrary number inflation than clever design. But these are complaints about the edges of an otherwise stellar experience. The core game, the main episodes for each character, the fundamental dice manipulation system, all of that is so well-executed that the rough spots barely register.
Quality
9
The level of polish here is frankly insulting to every other indie game I've reviewed this month.
Innovation
8
First time since Slay the Spire that I've seen someone genuinely reinvent how deckbuilding roguelikes work instead of just copying them.
Value
9
Six distinct characters that completely change how you play, procedural generation that doesn't feel repetitive, and I haven't even mentioned the episode system yet.
Gameplay
9
I planned to play one run and ended up losing three hours to the Robot's blackjack gambling problem.
Audio/Visual
9
Chipzel's soundtrack is aggressively catchy and Marlowe Dobbe's art style makes killer vacuum cleaners somehow adorable, which shouldn't be legal.
Replayability
9
Each character has multiple episode variations that completely remix their rules and I genuinely want to finish all of them, which never happens.
What Didn't Annoy Me
Genuinely innovative dice mechanics that create real strategic depth instead of random chaos
Six characters with completely distinct playstyles and multiple episode variations that remix their rules
Episode structure respects player time instead of demanding infinite grinding for incremental progress
Chipzel soundtrack and Marlowe Dobbe art combine into an audiovisual package that's annoyingly perfect
Equipment synergies and dice manipulation create legitimate deckbuilding depth
Procedural generation balanced with curated challenges means variety without total randomness
What Made Me Sigh
Some late-game episodes cross from challenging into frustrating with arbitrary difficulty spikes
Equipment explanation could be clearer about exactly how complex interactions resolve
RNG can occasionally screw you on shop offerings before you've built a functional dice engine
Post-game bonus content feels more like number inflation than interesting mechanical challenges
A few character/episode combinations feel significantly harder without being more interesting
Final Verdict
I went into Dicey Dungeons ready to write another rant about roguelikes that mistake randomness for strategy. Instead I found one of the smartest deckbuilding roguelikes in years, built on a dice system that actually requires planning instead of prayer. Terry Cavanagh, Chipzel, and Marlowe Dobbe created something that makes me reconsider what dice mechanics can do when someone bothers to design around them properly. If you've burned out on Slay the Spire clones or think roguelikes have nothing new to offer, this is the rare exception that earns its innovation claims. If you hate dice-based games, play it anyway because this might actually change your mind. And if you just want a roguelike that respects your time while offering genuine strategic depth, Dicey Dungeons delivers. I'm genuinely annoyed at how good this is. Now I have to find six other games worth playing and they're all going to disappoint me by comparison.
Dicey Dungeons
Genre
Strategy
Developer
Terry Cavanagh
Platform
Windows, Mac, Linux
Release Date
Jan 1, 2019
Rating
8.8
/10
Tags
I've spent twenty years watching roguelikes bolt random mechanics onto tired formulas. Then Terry Cavanagh turns dice into a legitimate strategic system and I'm furious that it actually works.
Paul
March 3, 2026
8.8
Overall Score
"I went into Dicey Dungeons ready to write another rant about roguelikes that mistake randomness for strategy."
Let me be clear about something: I hate dice. I've hated dice since every tabletop RPG session ended with someone blaming their bad rolls instead of their bad decisions. Dice are the refuge of lazy game designers who want 'replay value' without putting in actual work. So when I saw Dicey Dungeons was about being a literal walking die fighting through procedurally generated dungeons, I loaded it up specifically to roast it. Then the tutorial ended and I realized Terry Cavanagh had somehow made dice into actual strategic resources instead of random number vomit. You roll your dice pool each turn and slot them into equipment with specific requirements. A sword needs any die. A bow needs evens. A spell might need a five or higher. Suddenly I'm not praying to RNG gods, I'm managing a hand of resources and making meaningful decisions about what to use where. This is what dice combat should have been doing for the last thirty years.
The Warrior is your baseline dice-slotter. Fine. Expected. Then you unlock the Thief who steals a random piece of enemy equipment every turn and has to figure out how to use whatever garbage she yoinks. The Robot plays blackjack to generate dice, gambling on whether to hit or stand for more resources. The Inventor has to destroy her own equipment after fights to craft new gear from the parts. Each character isn't just a different sprite with tweaked numbers, they're fundamentally different gameplay systems. The Jester randomly transforms dice values and equipment every turn, forcing pure adaptation. The Witch uses spells that upgrade based on specific dice combinations. I genuinely enjoyed learning all six classes, which hasn't happened since I was young enough to have free time. Even better, each character has multiple episodes that completely change their rules. The Warrior's later episodes add countdown timers, limit rerolls, or flip the entire combat system. It's not just harder difficulties, it's remixed rulesets that make you rethink everything you learned.
Here's where Dicey Dungeons does something quietly brilliant that most roguelikes are too cowardly to attempt. Instead of endless randomized runs until you stumble into a winning build, it's organized into discrete episodes with curated challenges. Each episode takes thirty to sixty minutes. You see the full arc of your character's power growth. You face a final boss that actually feels like a conclusion instead of just another floor. Then it's over and you can move on or try a different episode. This is the opposite of every roguelike that's tried to waste infinite hours of my life with 'just one more run' psychology. Dicey Dungeons says 'here's a complete experience, now here's another complete experience with different rules.' The procedural generation keeps individual runs fresh, but the episode structure means you're progressing through actual content instead of grinding the same seventeen floors forever. I cannot overstate how much more I respect this approach. It treats my time like it has value, which is a novel concept in this genre.
Chipzel's soundtrack is the kind of aggressively upbeat chiptune that burrows into your brain and refuses to leave. I've been humming boss fight music for three days. This is biological warfare. Marlowe Dobbe's art style is so cheerful and colorful that it makes me angry. Vacuum cleaners shouldn't be cute. Irish mythology creatures shouldn't have big friendly eyes. Everything is so visually cohesive and immediately readable that I can't even complain about UI clarity. The animations are snappy, the feedback is instant, the whole presentation feels like it was made by people who actually care about game feel instead of just shipping functional garbage. Lady Luck as the villain works because she's got that perfect game show host energy, all fake enthusiasm and barely concealed contempt for contestants. The writing is light but lands its jokes. The whole aesthetic package comes together so well that it makes every asset flip roguelike look even worse by comparison.
The equipment system is where this whole thing clicks into place. You're not collecting generic stat upgrades, you're building a dice engine. A piece of gear might duplicate a die's value. Another might let you add or subtract from a roll. Some equipment activates when you use specific numbers, creating combo chains. You start seeing synergies between items, planning out your turn order to maximize dice efficiency. It's deckbuilding roguelike strategy except instead of playing cards from your hand, you're allocating dice rolls to equipment slots. The genius move is that bad rolls aren't automatic failures. A one isn't useless if you've got equipment that wants low numbers or can manipulate dice values. The strategic depth comes from building a loadout that can handle whatever your dice give you, not from praying for sixes. Enemy design supports this by giving monsters their own dice-based mechanics. You're not just managing your own resources, you're predicting what the enemy can do with their rolls and planning accordingly. Boss fights become these beautiful puzzles where you're racing against their dice engine while managing your own.
The later episodes can get genuinely punishing in ways that feel more frustrating than challenging. Some rule modifiers just feel bad instead of interesting. A few character/episode combinations rely too heavily on getting lucky with equipment drops early. The difficulty curve isn't always smooth. Sometimes you steamroll, sometimes you get destroyed by floor three because the shop didn't offer anything useful. The game doesn't explain some of the more complex interactions clearly enough. I had to learn through trial and error that certain equipment effects don't stack the way I expected. The final final bonus content after you've cleared everything gets extremely hard in ways that feel more like arbitrary number inflation than clever design. But these are complaints about the edges of an otherwise stellar experience. The core game, the main episodes for each character, the fundamental dice manipulation system, all of that is so well-executed that the rough spots barely register.
Quality
9
The level of polish here is frankly insulting to every other indie game I've reviewed this month.
Innovation
8
First time since Slay the Spire that I've seen someone genuinely reinvent how deckbuilding roguelikes work instead of just copying them.
Value
9
Six distinct characters that completely change how you play, procedural generation that doesn't feel repetitive, and I haven't even mentioned the episode system yet.
Gameplay
9
I planned to play one run and ended up losing three hours to the Robot's blackjack gambling problem.
Audio/Visual
9
Chipzel's soundtrack is aggressively catchy and Marlowe Dobbe's art style makes killer vacuum cleaners somehow adorable, which shouldn't be legal.
Replayability
9
Each character has multiple episode variations that completely remix their rules and I genuinely want to finish all of them, which never happens.
What Didn't Annoy Me
Genuinely innovative dice mechanics that create real strategic depth instead of random chaos
Six characters with completely distinct playstyles and multiple episode variations that remix their rules
Episode structure respects player time instead of demanding infinite grinding for incremental progress
Chipzel soundtrack and Marlowe Dobbe art combine into an audiovisual package that's annoyingly perfect
Equipment synergies and dice manipulation create legitimate deckbuilding depth
Procedural generation balanced with curated challenges means variety without total randomness
What Made Me Sigh
Some late-game episodes cross from challenging into frustrating with arbitrary difficulty spikes
Equipment explanation could be clearer about exactly how complex interactions resolve
RNG can occasionally screw you on shop offerings before you've built a functional dice engine
Post-game bonus content feels more like number inflation than interesting mechanical challenges
A few character/episode combinations feel significantly harder without being more interesting
Final Verdict
I went into Dicey Dungeons ready to write another rant about roguelikes that mistake randomness for strategy. Instead I found one of the smartest deckbuilding roguelikes in years, built on a dice system that actually requires planning instead of prayer. Terry Cavanagh, Chipzel, and Marlowe Dobbe created something that makes me reconsider what dice mechanics can do when someone bothers to design around them properly. If you've burned out on Slay the Spire clones or think roguelikes have nothing new to offer, this is the rare exception that earns its innovation claims. If you hate dice-based games, play it anyway because this might actually change your mind. And if you just want a roguelike that respects your time while offering genuine strategic depth, Dicey Dungeons delivers. I'm genuinely annoyed at how good this is. Now I have to find six other games worth playing and they're all going to disappoint me by comparison.
Dicey Dungeons
Genre
Strategy
Developer
Terry Cavanagh
Platform
Windows, Mac, Linux
Release Date
Jan 1, 2019
Rating
8.8
/10
Tags