Roguelike deckbuilders need to do something pretty special to stand out nowadays, what with the Slay The Spileup of bangers over the past few years. Cobalt Core, Wildfrost, Samurai Showdown (if you squint). All excellent, but Diceomancer stands out above even those, thanks to a clever gimmick and a hefty dose of chutzpah. It’s there in the strapline, you know the deal, but to emphasise: you can reroll ANY number on your screen.
Your health, enemy health, attacks, blocks, buffs, mana, gold – all fair game. The numbers in encounters. On Relics. Have at ‘em! Heck, and that’s before you start scribbling in the rulebook.
You can’t quite reroll willy-nilly, with each reroll requiring either specific cards or a use of a relic that charges up between encounters, but that still means you get to reroll pretty willy-abundantly. Design touches apply just enough brakes to stop that being boring: the pipe-wielding sewer rat in front of you will have its health bar divided into chunks, for instance, so you can’t just zap it all away with one shot. You can permanently change a card to, say, draw 20 cards rather than 2, but from then on playing it will advance the purple mist that chases you on the map between encounters, spelling doom in much the same style as FTL’s rebel fleet. The One Die relic that powers your rerolls also only starts as a piddly D6, scaling up to a D20 over the course of a run if you manage to consistently upgrade it.
Pipe-wielding sewer rats are representative of the mischievous chaos that Diceomancer embraces at more or less every possible level, from the encounter art in the style of a child’s crude drawings to the fishing mini-game that awaits at the end of a successful run (impacting nothing except the fish counter on the main menu). It’s an indulgently playful setting where multiverse shenanigans leave room for dumb jokes, like the inclusion of a Hitchhiker’s Guide relic that prevents you from becoming panicked.
It’s all so lively, and all the more so thanks to animations that jazz up many cards, showing your hands firing a pipe-gun into the face of the opposing goose, or spinning the crank on a magically-summoned organ gun. The Vicious Mockery card just has you waggle your finger at your foes, doing bonkers damage for each keyword on every card left in your hand. One mark of a good deckbuilder is how many cards make you stop and go “wait, what”, and this teems with ‘em. I can turn every copy of a number into zero! I can gain effectively infinite mana! I can use every card in my hand! (As long as I have thirteen of them and they all have different names!) I can play a very very angry frog!
But such wild possibilities don’t make it thoughtless – you still have to be considered, especially early in a run before you’ve built something broken. There are clever intricacies to chew on, beyond straightforward energy costs, that deepen the puzzle presented by every hand. The core complication is coloured mana: every card requires appropriately coloured mana to play, which you get by discarding cards of that colour. I do a little dance whenever a game demands I spend possibilities as currency, and here it forms the backbone of a card ‘em up that would be compelling even without the ability to reroll anything.
It’s yer good old blend of tried and true ideas, fused to refreshingly new ones. (Granted, Rogue Lords already tried the whole UI-hacking thing, but there it felt like a fallback rather than a constant consideration). There’s a whiff of Monster Train’s factions to the class choices, which you build from a combination of coloured orbs at the beginning of each run, except these decks blend themes more than they do cards. The green orb revolves around summoning helpful spirits, but pair it with the blue orb and you’re the Builder, constructing Da Vinci steam tanks and Dyson Spheres.
Beyond their cards, the classes have abilities that can make you view the whole game differently. At first you might see Luck, where every roll lets you roll multiple dice and take the highest result, as a straight buff – and Bad Luck, which does the opposite, as a crippling handicap. But then you remember that sometimes low numbers are good numbers. I hated the Barbarian class, until I realised they’re effectively immortal as long as you can afford to keep re-rolling their special injury buffer to only take a smattering of damage each turn. I even had one run where I deliberately downgraded my One Die into a D4, shrinking any scary number into a harmless widdle baby digit, grinning every time.
The point is that beyond the novelty lies overpowered nonsense that makes you feel dead clever, as if you’re spotting hacks you could fool yourself into thinking the developers had overlooked. Imagine cannily rerolling a Relic in the Spire to triple its damage, or its buff count, or to make it activate ten times instead of two. Once you’ve figured out where to make effective cuts with your One Die scalpel, it becomes a devastating and flexible tool – and once you’ve played enough runs to pour the required number of points into the perma-upgrade tree, you can crack open the rulebook and draw 20 cards a turn. It’s silly, borderline excessive, but it works.
The price is longevity. On every run it doesn’t take long before I bag myself an absolutely devastating combo, then just repeatedly play that. A rare, exquisite Slay The Spire run can see you go endless, drawing enough cards while generating enough energy to infinitely thwack away at whatever poor schmuck you’re facing. With Diceomancer I can make that happen on almost every run, once they get going, often pasting every monster on the first turn. Every hand is a puzzle, until you hit the point where you’re so powerful that the puzzle becomes trivial – then you enjoy that for a while, go fishing, and start afresh.
Or leave it there! It took me around twelve hours to reach the top of that upgrade tree, at which point I’d seen everything and broken the game in a dozen different ways. For many, that will be a sensible stopping point. There are the now-traditional 20 ascension ranks, but the challenges they present don’t escalate quickly enough to offset the base difficulty becoming relatively easy once you’ve figured out a few tricks. Besides, honing optimal strategies isn’t really the point. Diceomancer isn’t a pit to disappear into for hundreds of hours, it’s a neat cave you pop into to see the stalactites.
“Hack the rules” is an ambition I applaud, and Diceomancer’s execution is pristine enough to make me throw in a little whoop. Peek into any corner and there’s something clever or funny going on: one bit of card art is a hat tip to Death Stranding, with a man wearing a familiarly boxy backpack tower and armfuls of carrier bags. One encounter makes you a participant in a loss aversion study. S’gold.
With great power comes diminished replayability, but that’s fine. Diceomancer is here for a good time, not a long time, and that’s part of what makes it worth yours.