Dice Dice Baby

Dice Dice Baby is dangerously good at turning “just one quick run” into a minor scheduling incident. The rules are easy to understand, but the amount of combinations you can build with special dice and lucky charms gives every run its own little personality disorder. It’s colorful, clever, immediately fun and much deeper than its presentation initially suggests. A genuinely excellent dice roguelike, made with a lot of care, good ideas and absolutely no respect for reasonable numerical values.

This is, as many others have said, basically Balatro but with dice instead of cards. Roll dice and try to get a target score. You get multipliers based on getting sets of the same value or runs of values in sequence. If you reach the target, you get money and a higher target score. If you don't, you lose. What do you do with the money? You buy more dice - or different dice. They come in d4, d6, d8, d10, d12 and d20 - but they have different abilities. Some always roll the same number, some add a multiplier, some give you more rerolls, some split in half if you roll an even number and others double if they roll an odd number. And then there are perks - the equivalent of Balatro Jokers. You can get access to new scoring combinations (full house, dice that add up to 7, etc), or extra money based on what you roll, or extra multipliers for having enough different kinds of dice. The bit that's more distinct from Balatro is that you can gain synergies based on the size and type of dice that you get. These vary between the different types - so if you have a lot of d20 you might get double scores on nat 20s, or a bunch of d10s could round up all your dice from scores of 6-9 up to 10s. Or you might have multiple metal type dice and gain some bonuses from those. You can also upgrade your dice so the score for that dice gets doubled or tripled before the whole total gets increased by the overall multiplier. The combinations of these factors - like in Balatro - give the game almost endless variability. Every few levels - I think 5 on all difficulties after the training levels - you have to face a target with an extra challenge. Your target is higher, or you can't use runs or your dice are treated as unlevelled. Again, this is equivalent to the final blinds in each round for Balatro. And then you buy more dice, and more spaces to fill when banking your rolls, and so it goes. For me, this is different enough from Balatro to be playable, while obviously having a very similar lineage. All of the achievements seem to be based on 'Complete this difficulty level with 6 dice of this type' - that's a bit limiting. There's nothing like 'Get a score of xxxx before round 10' or such, and none seem to be hidden, so you know exactly what you need to try to get for each. That's good and bad - there are no mystery ones that you just achieve randomly without knowing about them, but you're not sitting there trying to figure out what the requirement is. Overall, I'm enjoying this as a change out from Balatro. And it's nice and cheap. Getting a solid recommendation from me.

Do you love Balatro? Buy this game. This is to Yahtzee what Balatro is to poker. Using dice instead of cards, you make number go up. Simple. Addictive. Fun.

Pretty not bad! You might dismiss this as a Balatro clone, but it approaches some of the same ideas at a very different angle. I don't think it's as -replayable- or as -deep- as Balatro, but I got sixty hours worth of joy out of my five dollars and that's a good deal.

they tried, but i can't come up with a reason to load this up instead of balatro.

suprisingly addictive

Deceptively simple game that really has that "just one more time" slippery slope of addiction. Easy to learn, difficult to master. The music is a bit on the repetitive side because of it though, so I'd suggest once you get tired of it just pull up your music player of choice and run your own tunes in the background.

Fun little roguelike dice game. Very Balatro inspired, but not as 'stylized'. Some dice types feel more difficult to work with, but all sorts of synergies are possible. Worth the low price if this type of game is your jam.

Super fun game. If you liked Balatro, this one’s right up your alley. The dice mechanics make it really interesting, and you keep discovering new combos the more you play. For under 5€, it’s totally worth it.

Great game and good developer support. If you loved Balatro, you will like Dice Dice Baby.