Dicefolk is like a Pokémon roguelike with dice, and it’s got a new demo

I spend quite a lot of my time thinking about dice games, so my attention was piqued by the new demo for Dicefolk – a sort of Pokémon battler but with dice (and also it’s a roguelike).

The gist is this: you form a party of cute-looking chimeras, before battling them against other cute-looking (but not as cute as yours, obvs) chimeras. Those battles play out a lot like the classic turn-based attacks of Pokémon, but are controlled with a set of dice.

There’s a bit of a twist, in that you don’t just control your squad of Pokém- I mean, chimeras with the dice. Dice on your side of the screen do things like attack, defend and switch around your squad, while dice you can activate on the enemy’s side let you switch them around, trigger effects and otherwise manipulate them to help you win.

Natch, the idea is to try and catch ‘em all (or, in Dicefolk’s parlance, “Recruit” or “Reject”), with different chimeras having a variety of powers and options to approach battles differently. There’ll also be talismans you can collect in order to discover the backstory behind your creature companions, and you can equip your pocket-monster pals with equipment to further spec them towards the perfect party.

Dicefolk is a run-based game designed for multiple replays, too, with a map screen with different branching paths similar to something like Slay the Spire.

The colourful, slightly-anime (are those horns, or catgirl ears on the main character?) artwork definitely brings to mind some familiar Poké-faces, along with similarly Mad Libs names like Dralcapel, Tormentine and the frankly hilarious Minkpocket.

You can give Dicefolk a go for yourself by nabbing the demo now available over on its Steam page, ahead of a future release later in 2023.