In the type of games where part of the compulsion is seeing numbers go up to ridiculous extremes, poker-based roguelike Balatro almost certainly has the crown. That said, there are no shortage of contenders vying for the top spot, and the latest is Dice A Million, which replaces Balatro’s cards with dice and Jokers with rings for your onscreen dice-rolling hand.

If you’ve played roguelikes such as Balatro, you’ll almost certainly be immediately comfortable with Dice A Million’s mechanics. You have a bag of dice, starting out with basic types, and you’ll need to reach a specific points target within a specified number of rolls. Before each roll, you’ll draw dice from your bag and will choose up to 5 (initially) to roll, then whatever is rolled is added to your points total.

Reach the specified total and you’ll get to a shop before the next round, where you can kit yourself out with more powerful dice (some of which have elaborate effects), buy one-off power up cards, improve your dice multipliers with stamps or purchase rings for your fingers, which add passive, ongoing effects that can apply to each roll.

Interestingly, there’s no fixed reward for passing a round; instead, the points you accrue are used to pay the target number, then any you have left can be spent in the shop, or even kept to help towards your next point total.

Along each path you’ll find treasure too, but you’ll also need to save points to attempt to reach these, with many requiring certain numbers to be rolled in order to unlock them. At the end of each path is a boss who’ll affect your rolls in some way, or massively increase your target. Defeat them and you’ll get a different currency to spend in the boss shop for very powerful dice or other equipment.

It isn’t, initially at least, particularly compelling, with a few really interesting rounds to kick it off. Yet it doesn’t take long for the magic to sink in, and it becomes a hugely addictive experience. Much like the aforementioned Balatro, it’s easy to sit down for one game and end up playing for much, much longer than you intended to.

It’s not without issues; for one thing, runs can end so abruptly, and at the whim of randomness outside your control, that it feels unfair in many cases, particularly against bosses. Even though the lure drawing you back into roguelikes can often be their punishing level of challenge, it feels as if games like Balatro manage their luck aspects a bit better than Dice A Million does.

It also doesn’t do a great job of visually clarifying its various special dice powers when a die is enchanted, and tooltips aren’t always automatically displayed.

That said, I started playing Dice A Million just a few days ago, and it has already consumed all of my gaming time since then.

Collecting the various dice and other artifacts for your collection is great too, as is just seeing what wild and crazy dice pop up next. There’s plenty to unlock and discover, and just about every time a run comes to an end, you’ll find that you’re going to start a new one immediately.

It’s got a lovely, lo-fi, hand drawn style and chirpy electronic soundtrack too; there’s also an almost Clover Pit-esque, sinister narrative lurking underneath that pleasantly retro-esque exterior.

All in all, then, Dice A Million is a great game, and its few flaws don’t stop it from being an incredibly compulsive experience overall.

Dice A Million is available on Steam now, and can be played for no extra cost as part of a PC Game Pass subscription right now, if you have one!

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