I was a bit skeptical at first because normally I'm not a tremendous fan of the "Number go up" type genre of balatro, but Dicevaders is one of the few I genuinely like a lot.

The biggest thing that sells it to me over the others: There is a pretty big focus on pivoting your strategy, the game generally encourages you to go for broad builds, as opposed to just stacking any one thing forever. That way runs generally stay interesting, instead of being " Well I got a mayonnaise build, guess I'll just buy anything that interacts with it from now on."

Runs are also still quick and somewhat easy to pick up and drop, similarly to Starvaders.

It's been nearly a year now! I joined the public playtest on the very first day it was available and it's been a pretty fun ride seeing and helping the game evolve into what you'll now see in Dicevaders!

I have 318.2 combined hours in total playing Dicevaders while I'm writing this, you'll just have to take my word for it. But numbers don't really mean much, so I'll try to tell you about it. There are a lot of things I like about this game but it's quite a lot, so I'll try to keep it short (that was a lie).

Let's start with the main theme first of throwing dice around and hoping it'll land on a certain number. It's used for scoring units or activating some artifacts and I really like how simple that is, because there are some crazy things you can do with this dice. The budge and chrono system work really well with the dice, letting you manipulate your dice rolls and get some control on what happens during your turns. Just like Starvaders (check that out if you haven't!), the chrono tokens can be used to reroll your dice, perks, and the shop which gives you more decisions on what you can get. I especially like budges as outside of changing a dice value by 1 or -1, it is often used as a currency to trigger some certain abilities.

Secondly, I really like the gameplay themes of many of the artifacts and perks, especially with the trigger mechanics and key words. Using a starter artifact from the demo exclusive to the commander called "The Captain" as an example called "Mothership", it simply gives you +1 budge every turn and pairs scored in a column gives the artifact in the column +10 XP. Looking at it from a standard view, it promotes budging your dice so that you can score pairs in columns that have your most important artifacts to level them up. You get a free budge each turn too to further promote this. However, the only condition from Mothership is that you score a pair. This means that you can do anything in your power to score a "pair".

Mini dice are a currency that is automatically used when your base dice run out and are tossed on random columns in groups of three. Combining this with Mothership, you can actually make your mini dice give your artifacts xp because if you're lucky, mini dice can form pairs! Dicevaders takes this even further because there's a perk in this game exclusive to The Captain called "Monocle" that makes alone base dice count as entire pairs, allowing you to score three pairs in a single turn with just base dice, whilst giving you xp for it (and crazier when paired with pair themed artifacts, what a mouthful).

The shop rarity mechanic is something I don't see often in roguelites which is surprising to me as it allows a lot of things to exist. You can get shop rarity through some artifacts, units, or perks, but mainly through skipping turns, which can be done by scoring the attack quota before the time limit. There are power imbalances in the shop items that exist in Dicevaders, but the game is aware of this, which is what the shop rarity system handles. Through dividing shop items by rarities, there is a lot of room to add experimental and crazy artifacts, which only need to compete with artifacts of the same rarity. When you increase your shop rarity, your chances to get rarer artifacts increases. As simple as that is however, it makes the pool of artifacts and units feel balanced because you earn the rng manipulation to receive your shop items through skipping or other means.

Alongside shop rarity, Dicevaders handles pivoting really well and I'd like to see pivoting as a mechanic in more roguelites. Due to the intentional power imbalances in common to legendary shop items, you're encouraged to pivot a lot. You get a lot of chances to tweak your build which gives you more opportunities to build toward the next turn/act, and it's not just replacing weak things in your set up. The game offers you many things that give reasons to pivot. For example, the Peashooter is an uncommon artifact that scores 3 random units in other columns when you score a pair in its column, which might make you consider grabbing dice power enhancers, units that do something when being scored, or manipulate your board just to optimize what Peashooter hits). This is just one artifact though, and balancing what you need to pivot towards flows really well with the rest of the things you get in this game. Artifacts can level up in Dicevaders too and some have better scaling than others (whether it be stats, or what exactly is scaled), which influences even more decisions in pivoting and that relates to another thing I love which is the commanders.

I really like the commanders in this game because just their starter artifact and unique pool of items they throw into the mix already changes how you're gonna pivot and what choices you make. All of them have a theme of requiring conditions to be met before giving you XP on your artifacts and give you unique benefits from specific things. The Core's "From The Deep" starter artifact is really simple, giving you an additional kraken base dice that gives +10 XP. This gives you a total of 4 base dice which might seem simple, but from the very start, you can form two pairs of base dice which can help you trigger pair related artifacts, triples easier, and score quadruples. Throw in The Overseer which lets you pick two random commander starter artifacts and pools and you've just unlocked even more ways to play the game.

Before I talk about what I don't like/are neutral about, I'll admit that I sometimes open up Dicevaders just to listen to the soundtrack when doing work, which did contribute to some of my hours on Dicevaders. Starvader's soundtrack was composed by Plasterbrain which was already great, so I'm happy that we got some more of that. Text setting's art style is beautiful as always, I can pretty much name all of the artifacts and perks in this game (or at least, what they do to some extent).

The Maw is one of the challenges I dread having to deal with in the daily multiverse. It takes away your ability to swap artifacts (buying a new one to replace one you already have), which takes away the pivoting aspect I like from this game. It's interesting skipping over some artifacts because you want to save them for better/rarer ones, but in general I don't like it compared to the other challenges in this game.

It's not confirmed whether a mid-run compendium will be added or planned, we can still hope for one. I just like the quality of life of seeing the compendium mid-run which was present in Starvaders. It is a bit annoying having to save and exit your current run and look at the compendium, and then go back and rewind to the last battle phase if you were in a shop. A history log containing your past runs would also be nice, I wouldn’t mind looking back at stats, commanders used, and the difficulty/challenge that I had in a past run.

Anyway, Dicevaders has been a game I've been anticipating for a while. I'm really happy that I got to be a part of the testing for this amazing game. If you enjoyed Nubby's Number Factory, Luck Be a Landlord, or Balatro, I really recommend giving this game a shot. I was a bit skeptical about the attack x mult scoring system initially, but Dicevaders is pretty different from Balatro, and that's a good thing.
Go play and break the game already!

This was not short at all.

An absolute banger game! It's honestly one of the best game I've played this year, a rightful successor of StarVaders and proof every indie fans should follow Pengonauts studio in the future!