I spent most of Steam Next Fest playing Balatro-likes—here’s a list of seven demos I think you should try—but it wasn’t until this weekend when I stumbled upon a nifty dice-roller called Dice A Million.
I’ve been playing the demo every day since, and you should too, but there’s a bonus: if you like it, you don’t need to wait for the full version. Dice A Million launched last week and it’s on sale for another week.
Yeah, it’s like Balatro, but with dice. You start with a few dice to roll and a score to beat each round, but it escalates incredibly quickly. Part of the reason is that you advance when you’ve run out of rolls, not when you’ve topped the required score—which means you can rack up a ton of extra points to spend between rounds.
In the early game of Balatro, you might buy a new joker, a couple consumables, maybe a voucher, but it’s rare to have enough money to go nuts in the store until much later into a round. In Dice A Million, even in the early game, you’ll quickly be drowning in cash and going on huge shopping sprees, buying new dice, adding cards (which can boost your rolls and enchant your dice), and covering your fingers in magic rings (which give you all sorts of bonuses).
The dice are really inventive, too. You begin with some lame ones, like dice with only three or four faces, but soon your hand will feel like an entire D&D set: D8s, D10s, D20s, and all sorts of surprises. My favorite die is one that has one of the other dice in the game as each of its faces. Once it’s landed on one of those dice, it then rolls that die. So you’re essentially rolling any of the possible dice in the game, which then gets rolled. That makes sense, right?
There are also dice that enchant nearby dice, or charge up their alt powers, or make phantom copies of other dice. There are jacks. There are bottle caps. There are coins. Just about anything you could imagine throwing or rolling or flipping from your hand is probably somewhere in Dice A Million. There’s even a die that looks like a Rubik’s cube, and when you roll it each of its nice colored faces pops off and rolls separately.
As you might imagine, the chaos of all these wacky magical dice means your score will be blasting through the roof, but hold your roll. Dice A Million is home to some pretty brutal bosses, and they’ll put a stop to your mad rolls pretty darn quickly. One boss will only count your dice if they roll odd numbers, effectively halving your score—unless you’ve prepared by stocking enough dice that only roll odds, which is possible.
(Image credit: 2 Left Thumbs)
Another boss will start little fires in the rolling zone, incinerating any dice that land close to the flames. Another will multiply all your dice by zero every other roll—you can probably do the math on that one.
I’ve had many a promising start abruptly come to an end thanks to Dice A Million’s harsh bosses. The other challenge is the store prices, which skyrocket after defeating a boss: dice and cards that used to cost a couple bucks will quickly be up into the hundreds. While you can go hog wild in the early game, the later levels are pretty tough, though one big balance patch was pushed through this weekend and there’s more on the way, so the game may get a shade easier in the future.
Personally, I’m OK with the evil bosses and brutal economy, because it’s just fun to amass a huge, weird arsenal of magical dice and watch the numbers go up when I roll them, even if I don’t last too long. Dice A Million is out on Steam now, and it’s 20% off until March 11.
