You ever wondered how dice multiply themselves? Yes, you buy them in a shop – and those dice are fabricated in dice factories. But what if I told you that’s not true.. Intrigued yet? Well, if you are, Dice Legacy might be your education on Dice reproduction (or a grim fantasy dice game that has nothing to do with dice babies, up to you!).
Dice Legacy
In this roguelike survival city builder, you lead your realm by rolling the dice because the dice rolls determining your fate aren’t happening in the background but are one of the main gameplay elements of Dice Legacy. Discover uncharted lands and guide your loyal subjects. Age of Empires, but with dice – yes?
Put your faith in the dice as you gather resources, construct buildings and expand the borders of your realm. First, create a strategy that fits your playstyle as you explore the wilderness. Then, test your luck as you make contact with the enigmatic factions populating the ringworld. But beware: something wicked is lurking in the mists beyond your realm, waiting for its chance to strike. And it would be best if you had some patience – since this game has an extremely high learning curve.
Dice Baby!
So, what to say about making dice babi- Uhm, Dice Legacy… It’s a good game, but with some issues o that might be game-breaking for you; but on the other hand, for people that like these kinds of games and want to try something new, it might be their next big thing!
Let’s talk graphics first; they are gorgeous, but some things don’t make sense. For instance, because of how the map is built and moves, buildings on the side can be obscured or incredibly hard to interact with if you’re centered on using structures in the center of the map, where everything looks fine. Also, the excessive need to constantly shift back and forth from your city built at the start of the map and resource gathering farther and farther away is an issue, as there is currently no way to gather resources without completely depleting the nodes that give them. I think it’s interesting to build a game on a ring-shaped map, though – however, it would have preferred a hexagon-style map like Age of Wonders for the gameplay.
Learning Curve
When I said there was a high learning curve, I mainly mentioned that the tutorial was terrible. You only get popups to explain something after you’re done it. Want to know what a particular dice type does or a building does before your get it? Tough. Build it and hope it didn’t mess up your plans. I restarted my game a few times since I figured it out along the way – a bit like Kairosoft does it things, so I wasn’t that mad about it, to be honest.
Winter is Coming
Another gameplay element that you see in the RTS genre is micromanagement. The Anno series usually set the bar pretty high, but Dice Legacy moves it up a bit. The early game especially encourages you to get more and more dice as you’re up against the clock of building your city enough, so you have the resources to survive the winter – since WINTER IS COMING – This forces you to go over the 12 dice pool limit and play a game of speeding against the seconds to use all your dice and reroll and put out more to keep things going, or else you throw out your extras. This improves in the late game as you can afford to improve your dice, which is another issue. But then there are so many extra clicks that are just not needed. For example, if I place a worker and the site requires two resources, I have to move and click my cursor twice to set each resource, rather than just once. And there are no toggles for “automatically assign resource” to save you the extra clicks and time as you’re trying to juggle 12+ dice.
Class Struggle
Dice Legacy offers a few classes – but it felt like they did not matter that much. A shame since that could have given the game the extra layer hardcore board game players are looking for. Dice classes hardly matter. I never used a single monk dice – there wasn’t a purpose to them. Then for the military dice, I used it once. It didn’t give me any benefits over my peasant dice. I used one merchant dice to get me gold – I tried using two but ended up discarding it cause it wasn’t as good as the others. The citizen dice had only one use – research. And for everything else – peasant dice did the job. Especially coupled with the benefits of peasant districts, there was hardly any reason to move forward with the others. Or maybe I’m doing something wrong – if so – tell me, please!
The UI works on the Nintendo Switch since most RTS-like games use features hidden behind tabs and other features. Sure, one can argue that the build menu should be wide enough to show all tabs and buildings, but why? I preferred using ZR/ZL instead of the d-pad for selecting specific stuff, but it was not game-breaking. Oh, and start the game off at its lowest difficulty – otherwise, it’s just stress management, and Dice Legacy becomes more annoying than complex.
Conclusion
So to conclude, Dice Legacy might not be up to everyone’s ally – but for those interested in taking a board game setting into a more interactive city-building game, this might be the perfect fit. I might not be the ideal example of someone who enjoys these kinds of things, but I certainly see the selling point of the genre. Just be sure to look up some gameplay before considering buying it after my review.
