#atico

gameplay

you place the dice on a board to determine what actions you take for the round. dice typically cost energy, too, so you have to pick and choose for the best placement for the turn. your dice are discarded at the end of the turn (which i personally don't like coming from origins). it does make highroller strategies feel less bad though, since you aren't gonna use the 0 roll anyway

you get a choice of dice sometimes (after battles i think..? i didn't note it). some do more than just the basic actions (like, poison dealing DoT, or mirror dice copying a die at another square. prism dice enabled nutty strats in origins at least, i've not encountered them here much yet). as a side note, regeneration and barrier are really good for the boss (basically just healing and shielding over time, respectively)

some dice have special properties (see above). i find hollow to be the most useful the most often, free action is expectedly pretty good. another notable combo is flash and terrain, to essentially snapshot the boosts it gets to keep the really big terrain boost on the board (strat built around those and prisms carried me through origins)

enemies can have modifiers too (see above). they make the game a lot more interesting, and it's fun to play around the restrictions they may impose (see below)

the little square comes from the beetle-lookin guy, and boosts them when you boost that tile. y'know, aside from blocking your own dice from being played

this one is usually the run killer if you're not prepared for it. well, at least the way i play it, since i stack boosts a lot (which stacks boosts for them and their allies). it's not a problem later in the game if you have relics and good dice to burst it

other roguelike stuff

not sure what to title this section, but this is for those non-combat stuff

map with branching paths, it's the usual. you use movement dice to move (naturally). you're incentivized to think about how you use your dice so you land on event tiles, since most tiles don't do anything. some tiles give small effects (like healing or damaging you). you have to land on battle tiles, but get to move as much as you were supposed to right after. rerolls cost a soul (currency, typically get one after killing an enemy, understandably) and is honestly pretty worth doing

speaking of currency, they added shops. not much to say, it's a nice shop. the relics are usually worth it

relics seem to be given out a bit more sparsely here, so i feel it's worth to pick a few up from the shop

some tiles have dungeons, which are a gauntlet of a normal battle, a shop, an event, an elite battle (two waves), and treasure. i find these pretty worth to land on

this is from a different dungeon but its a lot of loot (there was souls too but did not screenshot)

rest tiles (campfires) are really good. if you have full hp it lets you increase it too

i really like this redistribute values thing

lets you play how you like (safer or more highrolly)

events are great, but i don't like how they're guaranteed passes now. in origins, you used the dice you have to roll to pass/fail a check (like in dnd or smth). now it's balanced by giving a drawback for the particularly strong ones, which, fair enough but i don't really like it as much

closing thoughts

i am very excited for the full game. i wanna try different builds (and hopefully the full game lets us get numbers as high as origins). i don't have much more to say about the game other than that i really enjoy it and i think the devs are doing a great job with it

if you like frogs and roguelikes and dice then you will probably like this game too. wishlist it and try the demo here if it seemed fun