StarVaders is a cracking little deckbuilder, which I thoroughly enjoyed when it dropped back in 2025. Now developer Pengonauts is back with a follow-up that turns the tables on the original formula and puts you in command of a robot army advancing on Earth!
This time, Pengonauts has backup in the form of Balatro and Raccoin publisher PlayStack, which is getting a reputation for putting out banger roguelites, if you ask me. The result of this re-roly union is DiceVaders, a game about robots and numbers. Here’s how it works…
Dice against humanity
In StarVaders, you played as a mecha pilot, fending off waves of space invaders on a grid-based battlefield. Cards were played, moves were made, and if you were lucky, the planet was saved.
In DiceVaders, the shoe is very much on the other foot. Now you’re playing as a robot army, hellbent on revenge against those squishy humans. Your weapon of choice: a handful of dice, naturally!
The action takes place across six columns, and you can eventually fill these columns with various units to create your own little robotic army. Above these columns are slots for your multipliers, which you pick up from the shop in between rounds.
It is the interactions between your dice, your units, and your multipliers that drive the gameplay in DiceVaders, and as I found out first-hand, the system is already working quite well.
Just like StarVaders, turning back time is an intrinsic part of the game. In this instance, you can re-roll the shop and also some or all of the dice that are in play. Not only can you re-roll, but you can manipulate your rolls with so-called budges, which let you adjust the number on your dice and thus the column that it activates.
Once the numbers are all added up, they’re added to your score, which builds over the course of each battle. You have four turns to get the Total Attack score you need, and at the end of that you’ll see a cute little automated space battle in a pop-up window. If you win the battle, it’s on to the next, but if you haven’t beaten your enemy’s Target Defense you will take damage. Each additional failure takes a health point until you eventually fall.
What’s in the Next Fest Demo?
Today I tried two of the three commanders included in the newly updated Next Fest demo, and it was fun to see the game from the other side of the battlements and control the bads from StarVaders.
The two playstyles I tried were sufficiently different from one another, with the first a standard build, while the second one – Blob Girl – has access to better tools that cost health to deploy, and also mini dice that auto-roll once your mains are confirmed. There are going to be ten commanders in the final game, including the Overseer, who’ll let you merge play-styles.
Bosses are the pilots from StarVaders; another nice touch. These opponents throw new wrinkles into the mix, restricting your actions and making things more difficult than a simple escalation of the points total needed to progress to the next battle.
Another big part of the demo seems to be the Daily Challenge, and there’s a competition for that via the DiceVader Steam Page. Furthermore, there are three difficulty settings if you want to scale the challenge with the three commanders currently accessible.
Based on an afternoon spent learning the basics and then finding cool new ways to make those numbers go up, I’m very much looking forward to sitting down with the finished version of DiceVaders. The Steam page says that the game will land on Windows PC and Mac later this year, and I look forward to rolling these particular dice again.
