My ability to get side-tracked can be very frustrating when it gets in the way of my every day life, however, it can also lead to me to some interesting discoveries.
You see, there is a lot of boring admin stuff that I could (and probably should) be doing to grow the site. Yet, it’s extremely common for me to not only accept more games than I can reasonably cover, but I also spend all of my pocket money on more games on top of that.
I am also fortunate enough to get sent speculative codes by game developers who would like me to write about their work here on the site. Most of the time I don’t have the time to look at these games for long, but every now and then one of these games will catch my eye and then hold my attention. Enter Pip My Dice.
What is Pip My Dice, then?
I already told you this one in the headline, because Pip My Dice is a pretty straight-up mish-mash of Yahtzee and roguelike RNG. Another way of putting it would be to liken to Balatro, but with a Yahtzee dice theme and a distinct lack of jokers.
Of course, this ain’t no Balatro clone, so let’s leave those comparisons behind us and instead focus on what Pip My Dice actually is and does.
In every new run, you start off with a small dice collection, which can expanded over time via the in-game shop. In each new round, over a series of rolls, you must build up a combo, positioning it as effectively as possible, before earning points after the third and final roll.
Most of the time, these dice combos are placed into one three boxes, as you can see in the attached screenshots. Not only do you get more points by rolling and playing your dice at the right time, but you can upgrade the multipliers to boost your score. In fact, this works both in the short-term and via permanent stats boosts.
Die, pip, and colour!
The “pip” in the title alludes to the fact that you can customise your dice in a number of ways, and it is here that the game really deepens.
As you progress through the campaign you can add trinkets to boost your score, which is a fairly standard system in this genre. Where Pip My Dice really caught my attention was the die customisation, which gradually increases in complexity as you play.
You can replace the faces of your various die with different symbols, which can impact on the way the dice rolls, boost the multiplier, or even change the value of a die face to complete a combo. There are also different coloured dice, which can affect your multipliers more generally, but they’re expensive and require a bit of saving.
I’ve only been playing on Easy and Normal, and I did fine in both until I inevitably hit one of the game’s boss challenges. These are difficult battles where you lose access to a useful part of your build or have to hit specific, inflated targets. I’ve only played for a few hours, but these difficulty spikes have kept ruining my best laid plans so far.
I’ve got so many games to look at right now, but I wanted to take the time to tell you about Pip My Dice before I go back to my to-do list. It’s not the most charasmatic game I’ve ever played, but there are so many different technical elements at work here, and that blend of RNG and mechanical complexity made for one of those games that I’ve found really interesting to learn and explore.
Pip My Dice is out now on PC (Lin, Win) and I played the game via access kindly provided by the developer, Diving Swan Games.
