DICE GAMBIT

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The most exciting part of reviewing games, for me, comes with titles that straddle the line between brilliance and disaster. It may sound contradictory, but these are the kinds of games that linger in the mind long after you stop playing. On the one hand, you get flashes of pure genius - mechanics that surprise, systems that engage, moments where you nod along and think, “Now that’s clever.” On the other hand, those same games often stumble in ways that leave you baffled, frustrated, or even a little angry. It’s a tug of war between joy and irritation, a constant weighing of the good against the bad.

That is exactly where DICE GAMBIT sits. It is at once an inventive, ambitious roguelike and a maddeningly flawed experiment. At its best, it offers tactical thrills, unique systems, and a fresh setting unlike anything else in the genre. At its worst, it smothers its own brilliance with clumsy execution, confusing systems, and punishing design decisions. The result is a game I desperately want to love, but can only cautiously recommend in its current state.

DICE GAMBIT begins with a wonderful hook: you command a growing dynasty of nobles, charged by their city to combat the Chromatic Plague - an otherworldly disease that transforms people into monsters drawn from the world of art. Instead of zombies, skeletons, or demons, you face enemies called Stains, Drips, Varnishes, and Brushstrokes. It’s a thematically rich and refreshingly original conceit, and one of the game’s most appealing features.

The monochrome art style helps the dark enemies stand out and the markers on the ground be clear enough to work, but the information when hovering over various bits and bobs is lacking.

Your family of nobles expands in skill and numbers over time, not only through combat but through dynasty management. You marry, have children, and slowly build a roster of heroes across generations. This isn’t just window dressing - the lineage system determines which abilities and traits you’ll have access to, adding depth and variety to your runs. In theory, this makes DICE GAMBIT feel like more than just another roguelike dungeon crawl; it’s about the legacy of your house, not just the fate of a single character.

On the battlefield, the game plays like a tactical roguelike with a sharp focus on dice. Each turn, your actions are determined by your rolls. Movement, attacks, defenses, and special abilities all stem from the dice you throw into the virtual tray. The system is immediately intuitive but deceptively deep. You’re constantly juggling the randomness of dice with the tactical positioning of your units and the abilities they’ve unlocked.

When it works, combat is a joy. Abilities feel powerful and varied, enemies come with unique threats, and the synergy between skills and passives can lead to explosive turns that wipe entire groups of foes from the board. There’s a dynamic rhythm to the fights, and a sense of escalating tension as enemy types combine in clever ways. One encounter might see swarms of fragile but evasive pests flooding the field, while another pits you against hulking supports that must be eliminated quickly before they empower the rest of the enemy army.

Growing your family is the only way to bolster your roster of characters - it is a fun, clever system, but hindered by the extreme costs of raising your new family members to a usable state.

These moments highlight the game’s brilliance. The game captures the thrill of pulling off a perfect combo, of watching a cascade of abilities fire in sequence, decimating everything in your path. The potential for experimentation feels huge, thanks to the wide range of classes, traits, and skills.

Unfortunately, for nearly every high point, the game offers an equal and opposite frustration. Combat may flow well, but post-battle screens drag interminably. Dice are central to the experience, but they too often misbehave - getting stuck in corners of the tray, failing to reroll, or producing turn after turn of useless results. Scenarios occasionally border on nonsensical, such as NPC allies dealing more damage to you than the enemies you’re supposed to be fighting.

The dynasty management layer, while ambitious, is even more problematic. In principle, it’s a brilliant idea: grow your house, experiment with marriages, and generate new heirs to expand your roster. In practice, it’s opaque and confusing. Offspring stats feel random, with little indication of how parent traits or stamina actually affect outcomes. New recruits sometimes arrive with stats far above their level, but still start at level one, making them impractical to develop. Stamina management, meanwhile, is punishing to the point of absurdity - characters tire quickly, recovery is expensive, and resources always feel stretched thin.

Increasing reputation with various characters is the key way of unlocking new classes, stat boosts, and new facilities within your estate.

These issues are compounded by the game’s reliance on dice as the ultimate arbiter of success or failure. Randomness is expected in a roguelike, but DICE GAMBIT offers too little control to mitigate bad luck. Entire turns can be wasted on rolls that yield nothing useful, with rerolls limited and difficult to upgrade. Gaining additional dice requires multiple level-ups, making progress feel painfully slow. The absence of meaningful dice customization is perhaps the biggest missed opportunity - being able to swap, upgrade, or specialize dice could have added depth and alleviated frustration.

If the dice weren’t enough of an obstacle, the game also imposes a strict time limit. Each act gives you only a few weeks - which acts as game turns, forcing you to constantly send your nobles on expeditions to gain resources and experience. On paper, this keeps the pace brisk. In practice, it means you’re perpetually running your characters into the ground. Health and stamina drain with every fight, recovery is costly, and the relentless march of time makes experimentation risky. Rather than feeling challenged, you often feel constrained.

This might be forgivable if the game communicated its systems more clearly, but information is scarce across nearly every screen. Combat lacks clarity in skill descriptions, management menus obfuscate important details, and progression systems feel more like guesswork than strategy. Roguelikes thrive on learning through failure, but here failure often feels arbitrary, the result of hidden mechanics rather than hard-earned lessons.

Let me tell you this - I hate this little robot and its shoddy escort missions.

For all its mechanical flaws, DICE GAMBIT has undeniable charm. The art style, with its manga-inspired character portraits and expressive emotes, is vibrant and varied. The customization options are generous, letting you shape the appearance of your nobles to your liking. Enemy designs are equally striking, with the monochrome environments making their dark, painterly forms stand out on the battlefield. The soundtrack is another highlight. A lively mix of Italo-Iberian tunes, it’s catchy and atmospheric, fitting the game’s unique “cyberpunk Venetian fantasy” vibe. It’s rare to find a roguelike with such a distinctive aesthetic identity, and it succeeds in carving out a space of its own.

It may sound like I’m tearing the game apart, but here’s the truth: DICE GAMBIT is fun. Despite the bugs, frustrations, and baffling design choices, I kept coming back. The thrill of a well-executed combo, the satisfaction of a perfectly timed ability, and the promise of new classes and traits to experiment with kept me invested. It’s a testament to the game’s underlying design that it remains engaging, even when the execution falters.

But fun alone isn’t enough. The game needs polish - lots of it. It needs clearer information, more forgiving systems, and better tools to manage its inherent randomness. It needs fixes to bugs, streamlining of tedious screens, and balancing adjustments to stamina, progression, and time limits. If those improvements arrive, DICE GAMBIT could easily grow into one of the most inventive and satisfying roguelikes on the market.

As it stands, right now, it is a flawed masterpiece in the making: frustrating, fascinating, and impossible to ignore.