Let the good times pass! Dicey Dungeons is coming to Xbox!

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

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

Usually in a video game like this, the random numbers happen after you make your decisions – you try to hit something and the random numbers decide if it lands or how much damage it does. But in Dicey dungeons, all random things happen at the beginning, 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 beginning of the game: let’s say you have a Sword card that has a blank slot that can accept any value of dice. Put a 1 and you will deal 1 damage, place a 6 and you will deal 6 damage, etc. But wait, you also have armor that only works with an odd number (1, 3, or 5), and the 5 is the only odd number it has, so maybe it’s better to use it there. So each round becomes a little min-max puzzle: you have this dice game and this card game, how do you do the most damage? Or build as many shields to defend or prepare for future turns? There are hundreds of teams in the game, and it can get quite tricky!

Also, there is not a single character you can lead through the dungeons, there are six. And each of the six has completely different teams and some radically different playstyles. Take the Robot, for example. Instead of rolling the dice on your turn, you have a kind of “push your luck” where you can keep rolling the 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 mechanics of the game in some way: different rules, different restrictions, different challenges. The game, from a design perspective, is really about exploring these different versions of the core mechanic, turning them around, 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 far the biggest project I’ve ever worked on, and it’s my favorite of my own games. A big part of that is because it’s a game designer game, if that makes sense – it’s based on doing all these design experiments, trying different things, and letting things get a little 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!