Dice & Fold – Is It A Good Game?

Dice & Fold is a solid roguelite game and a refreshing take within the genre for its dungeon crawler, solitaire-inspired, dice gameplay. Although with a lack of polish and apparent UI issues.

It is a dice, not a card game, however, in case you might think otherwise from how it looks, and also not one without its flaws. For a more detailed look, let’s dive in and discover everything this game has to offer.

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System Requirements (Windows)

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Dice & Fold Gamplay trailer

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Overview of Dice & Fold

The core gameplay loop of Dice & Fold consists of rolling dice and inserting them into the correct slots to interact with different mechanics of the game, whether to kill an enemy (or fold them), use your ability, or save your dice for extra rewards. 

However, your dice rolls are a limited resource that can only be gained every turn or with special ability. It is this limitation combined that forces you to strategize your rolls and abilities to maximize your chances of clearing the dungeon and earning the rewards

Progressing through the game, you will unlock new character classes (or heroes) and team up with different companions who can aid you in your quest. With coins as a reward for clearing the dungeons, you can acquire items and trinkets with passive abilities that further enhance and synergize with your play style. All of this is to ultimately overcome enemies that are tougher and harder to fold with every new run.

Roguelite Gameplay

Every dungeon run starts with picking your character. Every character class has a different health number, armor, ability, and different conditions to activate its ability. Once inside the dungeon, you will encounter different enemies at each level where you will need to clear all of them to progress to the boss and finally clear the dungeons.

Your encounters are progressed in turn-based stages and you generally want to clear them as soon as possible so as not to suffer penalties from the dungeon. Every turn, you are given 2 dice rolls with which you can choose to perform one of the following actions:

1. Fold the enemies: Put your dice on the enemies’ matching slot according to their condition up to the total amount required (Total Slot). Enemies can deal damage to your hero which can quickly chip away at your health pool after every turn – health being a precious resource that is very difficult to recover and will potentially end your run once you reach 0 health. However, you only get two dice per turn and that number will not see significant increases over the course of a dungeon run. Standard enemies take one or two dice rolls to fold and stronger enemies can easily take up to six. Thus it is important that you prioritize folding the enemies: the stronger they are, the quicker they must be folded.

Besides matching the dice that take away enemies’ “health”, there are also unique conditions to folding each enemy. From simpler conditions such as “roll a 1” or “roll something greater than 4” to progressively more difficult conditions like “roll enough dice to equal 60”.

2. Activate hero skill or companion skill: Your hero’s skill and companion’s skill can also be activated by matching your dice onto their slots with the right condition.

3. Save the dice rolls: You can even save your dice for another turn in a three-slot tray which will allow you you flexably save your unused rolls for the next one. You can alternatively save the rolls for an additional gold coin by matching them in a six-slot tray on the right. These save mechanics allow you to manage your rolls according to your priorities and tactics.

In every 7th stage of an encounter, the dungeon master will appear and increase the damage dealt by all enemies who can only be folded by clearing all enemies. This is to discourage players from prolonging the fight to exploit healing or earning gold coins and instead to clear the level as quickly as possible.

Finally, at the end of every successful or failed dungeon run, you are rewarded with different unlocks or coins accordingly. This allows you to purchase items that complement your build, along with different hero and companion unlocks that can be selected before every run.

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Pros of Dice & Fold

Fun and intuitive dice “Solitaire” mechanic: In essence, the core concept of the game works. By rolling dice and manipulating the rolls in strategic ways to optimize your turn as efficiently as possible, the game encourages you to think and experiment with many tactics and combinations which feels gratifying once you successfully clear a difficult run. Perhaps this is no surprise, similar concepts in other games like Dicey Dungeons, Circadian Dice and One Deck Dungeon have already proven to work well.

The game is at its best when it allows the most optimal play by combining various abilities and actions together to efficiently end the fight in a single round. There’s an intrinsically rewarding feeling when you know that you have utilized to the best of your ability and execute the best play possible i.e. clearing a level in a single round. 

Diversity and Replayability:

• Multiple characters with different abilities: For each hero class and companion, you need to fulfill distinctive dice requirements to activate, which usually can be activated once per fight. On this note, the game features more than playable hero classes, each with unique abilities and playstyles. The more you unlock the more complex abilities you can have access to.
• Trinkets as customization: There are special trinkets or bonuses to choose from when starting a run that can be unlocked after clearing a dungeon. These Items (or trinkets) serve as passive synergizers that adds a layer of customization and variety to your build.
• Monsters: Besides the big bad monster you will find later in the game which requires progressively higher Total Slot count. There are enemies with distinct requirements to fold. Such as The Devil, which requires three 1s, which will force the player to consider keeping a 1 dice around instead of just stockpiling 6s for the Total Slot count. These dice requirements not only to fold the enemies but in certain cases can offer different rewards and trinkets as well. Thus encouraging the players to think and make their play accordingly.

Affordable: The game is relatively inexpensive at 12 USD and, considering it is roguelite with good replayability, can go a long way for your bucks. The game currently has a good track record for getting updates and there are also free content updates promised by the developers.

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Cons of Dice & Fold

Misleading advertising:

This can be a minor complaint or a very major one. The truth is that it seems like the promoter of this game utilizes its comparable aesthetic with other popular roguelikes like Slay the Spire or Vampire Survivors and appeal to those players. However, we have come to find that these comparisons really just do not have much weight behind them. Does that mean fans of Slay the Spire or such would not enjoy Dice & Fold? Of course not. Dice & Fold can be a fun game, and there are similarities between these games, just not the ones being advertised.

1. It is not like Vampire Survivors:

"Between stages, players have the opportunity to choose items, similar to the mechanics in Vampire Survivors. These upgrades range from enhancing dice rolls and bolstering class abilities to gaining new effects that can turn the tide in challenging encounters."

Tinymice Entertainment

2. There are no drawing cards or deck building:

"With the generative dungeon system, reminiscent of the branching pathways in Slay the Spire. This element of choice ensures that each journey through the dungeons is a unique experience, filled with unexpected challenges and rewards. As the player you will choose the enemy and upgrade cards you want to keep in your next turn."

Tinymice Entertainment

This is by far the most misleading part of the game. Despite the game being represented as various cards, Dice & Fold is NOT a card game. It is more like a tabletop dice game with the card as an aesthetic. There are no cards for you to draw, play or organize. Thus there is no “luck of the draw” of a card game. The randomness in the game is given by the dice rolls.

Hence, the “decks” in this game are purely aesthetic. There is a “deck” of enemies but they are also the same and there is no variation in type or order. There is a “deck” of items but those are just items that is simply shown as cards.

3. There are no branching pathways:

Another thing that is outright non-existent in the game is the promise of a “branching pathways” type of run. There is no “path” and players cannot diverge from the default dungeon with any decision past the very beginning where they can pick a character class. There is no justifiable reason for the game to infer a non-existent part of another game that is just not all that similar in order to draw some relevancies from a successful game like Slay the Spire. If not an effort to mislead, we suspect this could be just a case of marketing material in the conception phase (which did not make it into the game) makes it to the release.

Minor UI bugs:

Do expect minor bugs that may require you to restart the game occasionally. These bugs could be relatively minor and they usually took the form of an enemy getting bugged out or sticking on the screen after being defeated.

The user interface can also be frustrating at times. Occasionally, button input does not register correctly, such as the “reroll” button. Furthermore, for a game that is all about putting dice in a slot, this action feels “loose”. You may find yourself putting a dice on a slot to later realize it wasn’t “in” yet. For such a common task in the game, it would have been better if they made the dice more sticky to the slot.

Flaws in game design concept:

The core game design and philosophy somewhat fall short at the balancing and resource-management aspect of the game. In particular, the game as of now incentivizes boring, drag-out fights to earn more currency.

This functionally translates to the fact that if players have been blitzing through the game without saving up good high-value dice, they may find the challenges later on impossible to overcome.

Essentially, this means you generally want to eliminate high-priority threats early, then stall out each round for as long as possible to amass as much gold as possible. This is mostly easy and safe to do as the more dice you roll, the more likely you are to get bonuses like health and more dice in future rounds. even though there’s a soft enrage mechanic with the dungeon master that is supposed to mitigate this, but in reality it is hardly enough.

This way of playing which stalls out the game to maximize your monetarily earning is the opposite of what players should be doing: to strategize and execute their play to end the round as quickly and efficiently as possible. In a word, the game should reward the player for intelligent plays that close out the encounter faster rather than simply punishing them for prolonging the fight.

Is Dice & Fold A Good Game

Having said that, those drawbacks do not detract from the game being a good game. If you enjoy roguelites and are bored with some of the more established titles, we don’t see any particular problem as not to give Dice & Fold a try. You might be pleasantly surprised. What’s more, the game has had a history of consistent updates up until now. Thus we could all reasonably anticipate the game to become even better in the future.