I normally dont review games this quickly, with only 3 hours of game time, but at this point I already know more than enough about this one to do it, and I want to give it some more attention if possible.
Dee-6 is actually a game I'm already very familiar with... mostly. It is basically an unofficial port of a board game called Deep Space D-6, which is a personal favorite of mine among my collection and one I've played many times. Well, I say "port", but that's just the start of it. It absolutely LOOKS the same, complete with the minimalistic enemy cards and dice symbols, but past that, this isnt just a port... this is a massive upgrade. This contains way, WAY more content, a big pile of added mechanics, new modes, and so on.
I want to state right away that no, this is NOT like FTL. The only similarity is that you assign crew to tasks... that's it. It plays nothing like it otherwise, so just keep that in mind. I know it's the first comparison many will think of when seeing this.
No, the gameplay here is very different. The basics are simple enough to understand. Your goal is to make it all the way through the Threat Deck, full of, well, threat cards. Threats can be either external (ships, asteroids, nebula, whatever), or internal (boarding crews, berserk robots, sickness, whatever). External threats go onto the right side, in one of the four slots. The slots are basically a way to track how much health each threat has... as they take damage they move down. For internal threats, you cannot damage them with your weapons, and so must assign the required crew to them to get rid of them.
You best do these things quick, because a new threat comes at the end of every single turn. Also, the Threat Die is rolled. Each threat will show a range of dice values that will cause it to activate, as well as text/symbols that tell you exactly what that threat does when it activates. The game does a great job of making it easy to keep track of all these things, which is good, as sometimes you will have many of them at once.
In order to deal with these threats, you have your crew, represented by dice. 5 of the sides of each die represent the 5 types of crew members. The 6th one, this purple eye thing, sends that die up into the sensor... get 3 in there at once and you draw yet another threat immediately. What of the normal 5 though? Well, this is where your ship comes into play. Each given ship has a variety of compartments, which each can accept specific crew types to do different things. The starting ship for instance has a weapons room, which can accept combat crew... one damage for one die, but if you have more than one at once before firing, each additional one adds 2 to that value (and damage can be split among targets). There is also a room that uses the orange crew to either refill your shields, or use a stasis beam on an enemy ship. And the commander room, which can either roll all remaining dice again, or change one die to any specific face. Among other rooms that are also there. Every ship will have different things they can do, and every ship is good at some types of things, and less good at others.
While the game may appear to be entirely luck based at first, that is not the case (even in the board game). Assigning dice isnt always as clear-cut as you might think, and the decisions of exactly how to go about it are important... it doesnt exactly take many wrong decisions to end up all exploded and stuff.
While those mechanics are great and all, Dee-6 takes it many steps further, building upon and enhancing the already existing mechanics. For instance, dice that you dont assign on a given round will count towards the RNG Compensator, which offers a whole bunch of different actions it can do when fully charged. You can also unlock different pilots, which give bonuses when used. And some other stuff beyond that.
The game also does a good job of easing you into everything. The board game is pretty brutal right from the start, but this starts off nice and slow, with some difficulty lowering options active when your rank (which you increase by winning runs) is low. And the tutorial does an excellent job of explaining everything you need to know as you go along.
There's a whole lot of content here too. The board game had a few different ships, and the threat deck, and that was about it. This has many ships, many pilots, LOTS of threat cards, a variety of different modes, and piles of special actions that can be done with the Compensator and other means. Some things (like the starter ship) are right out of the board game... many others are unique to this one. Seriously there is SO MUCH to do here.
Dee-6 is sort of a love letter to a cult classic board game that is super fun in its own right, being far more than just a mere digital port. As someone who has played the board game absolutely to death, this is one I'll be coming back to for a long time to come.
Quite impressed with this one, indeed, and highly recommended to fans of board games and dice games in particular. Seriously, it's excellent stuff.
