Dice Legacy is a Roguelike City-Builder game and is the second Steam release from DESTINYbit. The central focus of the game is to expand your empire forward on a ringworld and reach the end of the continent to win a run.

The music and aesthetics of the game are designed around a medieval theme. Early buildings are made of wood and have straw roofs. Tile roofs and stone buildings become more widely used as you progress further down the tech tree and your civilization becomes more advanced. This design pairs nicely with the orchestral soundtrack of the game.

The core gameplay centers around rolling dice that represent your citizens and using whatever face is shown to run a building for a set amount of time. After a building completes its cycle the dice will come back to your bar at the bottom of the screen and will need to be rolled again before it can be used. The player can roll all the dice that are currently not being worked at any time and all dice will be rolled if they are not locked. This means if a die shows a face that the player has no use for, it can be rerolled.

Rolling a die will lower its durability by one and if you attempt to roll a die with zero durability it will break. A die’s durability can be restored in two ways: The primary way is to place the die in the cookhouse with two pieces of food, which will restore the durability by a set amount. Later in the game, the player will have the option of using a monument to restore the durability of all dice in the pool at the bottom of the screen. For the most part, the cookhouse is the main way to restore durability.

The dice in the game represent your population and fall into five different classes. The peasant, the citizen, the merchant, the monk, and the soldier are all represented by dice. Depending on which leader you pick, your starting die will vary. However, all classes of dice will be available in a run. Each class of die has different faces. For example, a peasant die has one work face, two harvest faces, one build face, one fight face and one explore face. A citizen die has two work faces, two build faces, and two study faces.

While most buildings accept any class of die, they will only accept specific faces. You will need to keep in mind which faces you need to progress as you can only hold 12 dice in your pool at a time. While the pool may only hold 12 dice you can have as many dice as you want, you just need to play quickly. If more than 12 dice try to enter your pool the extra die will be discarded.

The goal of a run of Dice Legacy is determined by the scenario you pick. The goal of the first scenario is to reach the end of the map. The map is obscured with fog and the only way to clear it is to expand your territory with district halls. The game also encourages you to expand your territory by placing a limit on resources obtainable at each node. Each resource node can only be used a set number of times before it breaks. By expanding your territory, you will gain access to more resource nodes that can be harvested to expand your territory even more.

The main opposition to expansion comes in three forms, the winter season, fires, and enemy attacks. Enemy attacks can only be handled by attack faces on dice. An attack may require more than one attack face power to defeat it, this means you will either need to use multiple dice or a die with a powered-up face. You are given a time limit on an attack before a negative effect will occur.

When fighting off an enemy attack, a die has a chance to become wounded. The only downside to a die being wounded is that if you use the die in an attack and it happens to get wounded again the die will be destroyed instead. There is only a chance that a wounded die will be destroyed if it is used to fight again, so you can use it if you feel lucky or need to.

Fires can be started by letting an attack timer run out or can be started by your peasants if their happiness is too low. A building on fire will cease operation if it is in use and needs work faces to be extinguished. The longer fire is left alone, the more faces that need to be used to extinguish it. If you wait too long the building will be destroyed. A fire can also spread to other buildings.

The winter season can freeze dice that are not properly warmed and can bring your progress to a halt. Dice being worked in the winter have a chance to freeze, which increases or decreases as the season comes and goes. When a die freezes, it will immediately stop work and come back to your pool. Frozen die can not be used until unfrozen, which happens at the end of winter or by using a tavern.

Dice Legacy features several scenarios to play through and you can alter your experience of these playthroughs with the ascension system. Bringing dice from other playthroughs of the game can change your approach to any scenario.

The game does a solid job of bridging the gap between two very distinct styles of games, but not without a learning curve. The City-Builder portion is fast-paced which can cause you to miss events while you are managing other parts of your empire. The different events and structures you come across also force you to use all classes of dice to truly succeed. Overall, Dice Legacy brings a lot to the table, and can be a lot of fun.

A PC review copy of Dice Legacy was provided by Ravenscourt for this review.

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Dice Legacy

$19.99

9

Score

9.0/10

Pros

• Different starting options
• Multiple senarios to playthrough
• Fast-paced desinion making

Cons

• Easy to get overwhelmed and miss events
• Hard to tell what a building is when close to other buildings
• Buildings can hide behind each other easily

Buy Dice Legacy for PC on Steam