Let the Good Times Roll! Dicey Dungeons Is Coming to Xbox!

Hello! I’m indie game designer Terry Cavanagh, and I’m here to tell you about our game Dicey Dungeons, which is coming to Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S and Windows 10 this Thursday. If you haven’t heard about it before, let me tell you what it is, and why you might be interested in playing it.

Dicey Dungeons is a boardgamey RPG – you explore dungeons, fight adorable monsters, and level up your character in an attempt to ultimately overthrow Lady Luck. It’s accessible and easy to play, but with mechanics that reward careful strategy and playing the odds cleverly.

Usually in a videogame like this, the random numbers happen after you make your decisions – you try to hit something, and the random numbers decide whether it lands or how much damage it does. But in Dicey Dungeons, all the random stuff happens up front, determined by your dice rolls – basically, you roll a bunch of six-sided dice and then you have to use whatever numbers you get in the best possible way.

So a simple example of what you do right at the start of the game: say you have a Sword card that has a blank slot that can take any dice value. Place a 1 and you’ll do 1 damage, place a 6 and you’ll do 6 damage, etc. But wait – you’ve also got some armor that only works with an odd number (1, 3 or 5), and the 5 is the only odd number you’ve got – so maybe it’s better to use it there. So, each round becomes a tiny min-max puzzle – you’ve got this set of dice and this set of cards, how do you do the most damage? Or build up the most shield to defend, or otherwise prepare for future turns? There are hundreds of pieces of equipment in the game, and it can get pretty complicated!

Also, there’s not just one character you can take through the dungeons – there are six. And each of the six have completely different sets of equipment, and some pretty radically different play styles. Take the Robot, for example. Instead of rolling dice on your turn, you have a kind of push-your-luck thing going where you can keep rolling dice, but if your total goes over the limit, you lose everything!

And then for each of those six characters, there are six different episodes, and each of those episodes mixes up the game mechanics in some way – different rules, different constraints, different challenges. The game, from a design perspective, is really about exploring these different versions of the core mechanics, flipping them upside down, experimenting wildly, and seeing what happens. The results can be completely broken, in the best possible way.

Dicey Dungeons is my third commercial game (after VVVVVV and Super Hexagon). By a long shot, it’s the biggest project I’ve ever worked on, and it’s my personal favourite of my own games. A big part of that is because it’s such a game-designer-y game, if that makes sense – it’s built around doing all these design experiments, trying out different things, and just letting things be a bit chaotic. Even after all this time, the game still finds ways to surprise me. I’m excited to share the game with a new audience on Game Pass, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!