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

Hello! I’m the indie game designer Terry Cavanagh and I’m here to tell you about our game Dicey dungeonscoming this Thursday for Xbox One, Xbox Series X | S, and Windows 10. If you’ve never heard of it, let me tell you what it is and why you might be interested in playing it.

Dicey dungeons is a board game role-playing game – you explore dungeons, fight adorable monsters and improve your character to ultimately overthrow Lady Luck. It’s accessible and easy to play, but with mechanics that reward careful strategy and clever chances.

Usually in a video game like this, the random numbers happen after you’ve made your decisions – you’re trying to make something, and the random numbers decide if it lands or how much damage it does. But in Dicey dungeons

A simple example of what you do right at the start of the game: suppose you have a sword card with an empty slot that can hold any dice value. Place a 1 and you do 1 damage, place a 6 and you do 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 Number you have – so maybe better to use it there. So every round becomes a tiny min-max puzzle – you have this set of dice and this card set, how do you do the most damage? Or build most of the shield to defend it or otherwise prepare for future rounds? There are hundreds of pieces of equipment in the game and it can get pretty complicated!

Plus, there isn’t just one character to lead through the dungeons – there are six. And each of the six has completely different sets of gear and some pretty radically different styles of play. Take the robot, for example. Instead of rolling the dice on your turn, you have a kind of game of chance where you can keep rolling the dice, but if your total exceeds the limit, you lose everything!

And then there are six different episodes for each of those six characters, and each of those episodes kind of messes up the game mechanics – different rules, different restrictions, different challenges. From a design perspective, the game is really about exploring these different versions of the core mechanics, turning 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). It’s by far the biggest project I’ve ever worked on, and it’s my personal favorite of my own games. A big part of it is that it’s such a game-designer-y-game, if that makes sense – it’s based on doing all these design experiments, trying different things, and just letting things get a little bit messy. Even after all this time, the game still finds ways to surprise me. I’m excited to share the game with a new audience in Game Pass, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!