Die in the Dungeon High Rolls Its Way To Deckbuilding Bliss

Thanks to Slay the Spire and its many successors, deckbuilders have taken over Steam (and my Nintendo Switch), capturing the fun of TCG drafts without requiring players to spend way too much money on booster packs only to get thwacked at their local board game shop. However, while this nerdy renaissance has led to untold hours of card-themed fun, given the sheer number of games in this style, it has become increasingly tricky for new entries in the genre to stand out.

But despite this crowded scene, Die in the Dungeon, a “dicebuilder” out in Early Access today, confidently finds its niche, combining gratifying puzzles with deep customization that lends space for player expression. Basically, it combines the “I just broke the game” qualities of something like Balatro with countless micro-decisions, offering plenty of room for agency despite the seeming inherent randomness of its dice-rolling conceit. Yes, there’s a lot of math involved, but it’s really fun math, I promise!

While Die in the Dungeon isn’t the first dicebuilder—this is different from a deckbuilder because you collect dice instead of cards—it takes this approach to new freaky extremes, eventually culminating in screens full of digits. You play as a cute little pixelated frog who, for reasons unknown, wants to reach the third floor of a dungeon and pulverize the final boss, a duke who is also a bug. Maybe he wants to eat the rich; who can say? To do so, you’ll first have to fight through lots and lots of insect-themed monsters.

The basic setup for these battles is as follows: each turn, you roll five dice from your deck, which can then be placed in slots on a board. Each playable character has a unique board configuration, but the default starter has a three-by-three grid in the shape of a diamond. Dice come in different colors, which correspond to specific actions, like attacking, blocking, and healing, alongside a long list of other skills, like boosting dice on the board, drawing more dice next turn, earning extra coins, and more. Whichever number you rolled for that die corresponds to the strength of its effects: if you rolled a three on a damage die and placed it on the board, this would increase your damage output by three that turn. By default, you have three actions a turn, and dice cost a varying number of action points depending on the number of faces they have (for example, a d4 can be used for free, a d6 costs one point, and a d8 costs two).

Sure, Die in the Dungeon is hitting a lot of familiar beats. Like in Slay the Spire, you unlock relics that modify your abilities. After each enemy encounter, you have the option to get a new card, erm, I mean die. As for the map, you navigate an overworld of branching nodes where you’ll run into shops, campfires, fights, randomized events, etc. But despite this long list of similarities, it feels quite different when it comes to its central element: the battles.

A particularly unique element is how you queue up your actions. As previously mentioned, you place a die on your board to determine what you’ll do during your turn. While at first, this doesn’t feel much different than performing actions in a standard deckbuilder, before long, things branch off entirely, resulting in procedurally generated brain-teasers where you’re incentivized to maximize the synergies between your dice and items. For instance, many types of dice can boost others, but only at certain distances, meaning how you configure them makes a big difference. On top of this, monsters will frequently manipulate the board, plugging up spaces or, in more interesting cases, setting up situations that will help or hinder your output, depending on how you respond. As a result, each turn feels like a fresh problem, as your rolls combine with enemy actions to create unique situations. And beyond just configuring your dice on the board, you’re also hit with constant tactical decisions, like if you want to prioritize damage in the short term to try and defeat an enemy more quickly or focus on defense at risk of letting your foe power up.

Much like how you have a lot of options in battles, there is also a great deal of freedom when it comes to dicebuilding, which results in dramatically different loadouts. Specifically, in my first run, I stumbled into a potent relic and upgrade combo that allowed my dice to remain on the board, letting me repeatedly buff them until I was dishing out tons of damage and self-healing each turn. There are many opportunities to tinker with your configuration: you can choose a new dice after every battle (beware of bogging yourself down, though!), receive free upgrades at each store, and obtain lots of relics. In particular, the ability to add new attributes to your dice can be transformational, like how the “Heavy” property lets you keep dice on the board, freeing up your actions. It all results in an experience that will wow even genre veterans with its depth, setting up meaningful choices that allow for highly tailored builds.

All in all, it’s such a well-put-together package that I’m honestly a bit surprised it’s slated to launch in Early Access and stay there for a year. This isn’t a game with placeholder programmer art and free-use tunes either; the pixelated visuals bring our bouncy frog protagonist and the dungeon’s creepy crawlies to life, and the soundtrack is a bunch of surprisingly high-tempo bops, full of woozy synthesizers that had me toe-tapping as I did my little calculations (again, fun math!).

The overarching structure also seems firmly in place, with three floors of challenges culminating in a final boss that took me a few hours to clear on my first attempt. There are even already escalating difficulty settings and multiple playable characters with unique starting dice and skills. While I encountered a few minor bugs, and they should add a smidge of narrative framing to explain why these frogs want to throw down with an aristocratic cricket, even with these minor issues, Die in the Dungeon is still more fully formed than many 1.0 launches. If this is the Early Access version, I can’t wait to see what’s in store for our plucky amphibian hero in the game’s full release; I imagine it will accomplish the difficult task of making math even more fun than it already has.

Elijah Gonzalez is an assistant Games and TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to playing and watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves film, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.