If you’re like me and have an interest in mythology and storytelling, then you might well be intrigued by Arthurian legends. This is an enigmatic period of British history that is cloaked in mystery, to the extent that nobody is even 100% sure that Arthur as we know him even existed.
The stories that have emerged surrounding Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table are rich, varied, and full of fantastical elements, and they continue to inspire a variety of creative projects, including the recently released Sworn.
Introducing Dicealot
While Sworn is an isometric RPG with co-op, this six-sided adventure is a very different kettle of fish. Developed by goodviewgames and published by the rogues over at Yogscast Games, Dicealot is a modern interpretation of a classic game called Farkle.
Farkle is an interesting little dice game, and I hadn’t heard of it before playing this. It’s a folk game and its first credible reports come after it arrived in the Americas via French sailing ships in the 1600s. All of this was news to me when I sat down to play Dicealot, but after doing a bit of digging and then working through the tutorial (twice), I had an idea of what was going on.
Simply put, both Farkle and Dicealot are push-your-luck games about rolling dice and trying to build up big scores. This new interpretation of the game is a puzzle roguelike, so there’s a lot more going on than just rolling dice, but at the end of the day, your progress is determined by the numbers you roll and the decisions you make.
How does Dicealot work?
Battles are loosely themed around encounters with Arthurian characters. In each battle, you’ll try and roll some good numbers and build a combo. The combos start off simple, but things quickly get complicated as more elements are introduced.
Farkle is another word for going bust. If you roll your dice and no combos come up, you bust with no damage scored, and your opponent takes their turn, which is just a simple damage roll and not a reverse of what you’re doing.
However, once you’ve rolled a combo – and that can be as simple as a rolling 1 or a 5 – and banked it, then you can start building your score by taking more risks.
You’ve got re-rolls that you can use to try improving individual dice, or you can roll everything that hasn’t been banked. It’s a case of managing your dice rolls as prudently as possible, trying to fill up all the spots and causing a “rollover” that lets you keep your score AND throw all six dice again.
These rollovers are at the heart of the game, and victory rests in getting a fist full of dice to roll again and starting to rebuild a second or third combo. Of course, with each dice banked, the odds of getting new combos diminish, and I spent most of my time in Dicealot weighing up whether or not to take the damage I had accrued or keep pushing my luck.
Changing the dynamic
There are loads of different ways to spice up each run and keep things fresh. I’ve got well over a dozen hours with the game, and I’ve not quite unlocked all of the different starting weapons, but each of these has its own quest dice to mix things up.
The quest dice are a key part of the game. You can hold up to six, and these are rolled at the start of each encounter. These powerful dice offer multiplier bonuses and power boosts, and you’ll need to think really carefully about which new dice you add to your hand along the way, because their effects can be profound.
I found myself managing my quest dice (at the top of the screen) alongside my power dice (at the bottom). These upgraded power dice have different faces, and therefore the odds start to stack in favour of certain outcomes. For example, you might have loads of dice in your hand that have extra sixes, and so you’ve got a raised chance of getting lots of sixes. Then, by equipping certain quest dice, you can start to make those sixes even more powerful.
Beyond the main dice sets, there are also shield emblems that give passive bonuses, and you can visit one of the merchants who’ll heal you up or boost the multipliers for certain combos. You’ll have to mix and match from across all of the different vendors, and it’s here that I think a lot of the game’s depth resides.
Final thoughts
I have spent a bunch of time feeling poorly and miserable over the last couple of weeks, but I took a lot of comfort from the gentle challenge offered by Dicealot, and I found myself coming back to it again and again.
Once I had worked out how it all fit together, I was able to start exploiting its systems and building big scores, which is required if you’re going to get into the fourth act. On that front, I think Dicealot could be better explained, and the player onboarding around key mechanics could be smoother.
And while I’m moaning, the dice rolling can feel a bit janky at times – I’m sure the game wasn’t cooking the numbers as such, but when they get too close the moving die can seem to pop out of position at the last second, and if that’s to a number that doesn’t suit you, it can sting just a little.
Despite taking a while to get into it and there being one or two moments of frustration, I was eventually won over by Dicealot’s medieval charms. While I think goodviewgames could have done more with the setting, it’s still an intriguing dice-based roguelike with a lot of personality.
Of course, it’s quite RNG-heavy, so don’t pick this one up if you’re not interested in pushing your luck quite a lot, however, if you enjoy a bit of high stakes dice rolling, this modernised retelling of Farkle is worth taking a chance on.
Dicealot is out now on PC (Win) and I played the game via access kindly provided by the developer.
