Dice A Million’s Magic Is In Its Rings
A crazy thing about the indie scene is that a popular game’s influence can be felt in a short space of time. I have to keep reminding myself that Balatro only came out in February 2024, because it’s already feeling like one of the most influential games out there. Buy a game and there’s a very good chance that you’ll be unlocking Jokers, or at least versions of them, as you play.
I think the devs of Dice A Million would embrace the comparison. The influence isn’t hidden. From the booster packs you buy to the ‘Faces’ – the bosses – that you have to defeat, this is a disciple of the Church of Balatro. But Dice A Million does what all the best descendants should: it builds on what came before.
Dicing With Randomness
Dice A Million is, as you’ve probably guessed, a Balatro take on dice games. And not complicated dice games, either. This isn’t Yahtzee or Perudo, it’s the age-old game of rolling dice in an attempt to get a higher score than someone else. You have to beat a score of X, and you’re totalling up the dice to get there.
While it’s a simple, comprehensible aim for the game, it does put Dice A Million at something of a disadvantage. Most other games in the genre build on a game that’s fun to play on its own. Dogpile is a merge game; Birdigo (a game we desperately want on Xbox) is a game of Countdown; Balatro is poker. Dice A Million is not fun to play straight out of the box, and that – I think – is its biggest failing. The opening levels just aren’t fun, and there’s a decided lack of strategy in the nuts and bolts of the game. Strategy has to come from what you buy, and what you choose to roll, not from how you play.
Luckily the dice are stacked in your favour. You’d have to be supremely unlucky not to get through the first couple of rounds of Dice A Million, which means you have time to start jazzing up your dice pile. There’s a shop after each round, and that shop offers dice with effects, ‘Stamps’ which multiply the numbers on the dice faces, cards that apply temporary buffs, and Rings – the Jokers of Dice A Million’s world. Booster packs offer a random assortment of all of the above.
The Fundamentals Of Dice A Million
Dice are the most common. Depending on the ‘Hand’ you chose at the start of the game (the equivalent of the decks in Balatro), you will be choosing and rolling a number of dice from your dice bag. If you can fill that bag with funky dice that adore a bit of synergy, then you can start multiplying your score.
There are a host of different builds that you can aim for. There are dice that split into smaller dice, which combine well with ‘area’ dice that benefit from being near each other. Some dice multiply their own value, while others add value to their friends. There are dice that exhaust (destroy) each other, and dice that benefit from being exhausted. Each die beckons you to abandon your current build and try something else.
Complicating matters is Enhancements, which apply a single modification to a die. The most purely satisfying is the Enhancement that reduces a die’s cost to zero, meaning you can roll more dice per round. But there are other effects that plug into the builds we just mentioned: retaining value-increases between rounds, or multiplying their value.
Stamps are the number-multipliers, and man I just can’t get excited about them. They multiply numbers in increments: get your first Stamp and it will multiply a given number (1-6+) by 1.2x, then 1.4x and so on. If the numbers were bigger, that might have gotten me hot under the collar, but we’re talking about 1s, 2s and 3s. Seeing a 1 go to 2 and then stay there for the next few Stamps is hardly the height of imbalance.
If You Like It Then You Should Have Put A Ring On iIt
But it’s the Rings – oh, sweet Rings – that are the rewards to chase in Dice A Million. I love how they’re represented: after all, you need a hand to roll dice, so your hand is shown on-screen with loads of jangly rings on each finger. I ended up looking like a glitzy nan after a game. And each ring does such wondrous things.
There are rings that will give you cards (spells, basically) every turn. Others will multiply every odd or even, increase the radius of area effects and, my favourite, toss extra dice in randomly. They are so disproportionally powerful that they will, with a few exceptions, benefit any dice bag, regardless of what they’re trying to do. Which makes Rings the reward to chase for.
You will need them, as the Faces are the bosses and they SUCK. They take all the oxygen out of the room, removing everything that makes Dice A Million fun. Rings are negated, dice are blacked out, and dice values are halved. They are the Fun Police. Even more so than Balatro, they demand that your deck work in ways that, actually, you might not have accounted for. And that’s kind of, sort of, fine. They’re meant to be difficult tests of your dice bag; we just wish they weren’t such dicks about it.
There’s something a little iffy about the balance in Dice A Million, and I would guess that it will be evened out over time. Whenever I’ve had a successful dice bag, it’s been an extremely small one, and the Rings have carried me over the line. The difficulty is ramped so high that I am not convinced some strategies work: I haven’t won with Stamps, for example, dice with charges, or bigger dice bags with a variety of dice. In my opinion, too many of the dice are plain bad: they focus on adding value to themselves, and don’t play a huge part in synergies or build focuses. It can be a struggle to get traction with what you’re given.
Finding Order In The Chaos
I’d categorise Dice A Million as chaotic and unrefined. It doesn’t have the effortless sense of balance that a Slay the Spire, Monster Train or Balatro has. Instead, there are clearly bad and good dice, Rings and cards, and it takes a bit of luck and judgment to learn which is which. It’s not necessarily a criticism. It just gives Dice A Million a different flavour. It’s a puzzle to be deciphered, as you find out what functions and what doesn’t.
I’m still playing Dice A Million, which is a decent sense of whether it’s working as a Balatro-a-like. I’m not as compelled as some of the better games in the genre, but I find it keeps popping into my head when I’m struggling to find the next game to play. There’s always something new to unlock, a new hand to master, a new build to explore. Dice A Million is a lot of things, and deep is very much one of them. This is as fully featured as the best of the genre.
A Balatro Beater?
Is Dice A Million here to usurp Balatro? Not a chance – rolling dice lacks strategy, and the various unlocks are too chaotic to truly master. But there’s still a lovely alchemy in Dice A Million which means that the chaos brings fun. When a collection of dice works, it really, really works, and the ludicrous combos and resulting multipliers give you a satisfying pat on the back.
I’m not sure I will be playing Dice A Million in a couple of months’ time, but right now I’m still finding time to dip a hand in the dice bag and take it for another roll. Which makes it better than 90% of the games out there.
Important Links
Dice A Million Rolls Onto Game Pass – And It’s All About The Big Numbers – https://www.thexboxhub.com/dice-a-million-rolls-onto-game-pass-and-its-all-about-the-big-numbers/
Play on PC via Game Pass – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/dice-a-million/9N3NTDPJCD9Z/0010
