Silmaris: Dice Kingdom

Intriguing premise at first, but the gameplay is ultimately too luck-based, while the UI/UX decisions make repeated playthroughs annoying. Allow me to explain. (Note thatI have many more hours on this game via GOG in addition to Steam). The gameplay is, as promised, punishing. You accumulate dice via your advisors, then spend those dice when you dispatch your advisors to resolve quests around the map. These range from attacking neighbouring cities, to exploring ruins, to hunting monsters. Every turn you will also be presented with a random event and a related choice to make. Many of these events are elaborate, and have branching story paths, and some even add new areas or quests to map. The problem with the core gameplay loop is that the quests are not particularly engaging intellectually. You just allocate the maximum amount of available dice to the challenge every time, since failure wastes all dice invested in the challenge, and there are additional penalties for failure in many cases, ranging from loss of advisor to losing the entire game. And the latter outcome is very frequent. Losing any battle challenge against your home city ends the game instantly. And if you ever go to war with a neighbouring city, let alone two of them, they can spawn a difficult army every turn. This rapidly depletes your dice pool, and since you need the war dice to defend, you can never actually attack the opposing city, resulting in a quick game over. Even if things are going well for you (always a temporary state of affairs), about half your turns consist of a single click to have all of your advisors generate and bank all available dice. Which you need to do constantly due to the difficulty and high stakes of the challenges. So half your turns consist of a single boring choice, implemented by a single click. On to the UI/UX side, the game contains a number of bad decisions for a roguelike. There is a 2-second unskippable turn animation that quickly becomes a frustration. When you click on quests or locations, there is another 1-second zoom effect that's totally unnecessary and again becomes quite annoying. And finally, the cardinal sin of a dice-based roguelike is that the dice take far too long to roll. The default setting is comically slow, and even the fast setting gets annoying when you will be rolling dice dozens of times in a single run, and hundreds of times if you play several runs back to back. Text from events you have seen before can sometimes be skipped, but not always, which is really annoying as you click through the recurring events to get to the decision. The devs did not respect the player's time when they made these decisions, which is bad enough in most games, but it's poison in a roguelike. And the game still showers you with tutorial pop-ups even after you completed the tutorial and are playing a regular game... why can't these be turned off? The events also limit replayability, because in virtually all cases there are clear right answers, and once you know them, you'll chose them every time. You'll also know to avoid the many hidden traps that are sprinkled throughout the event deck. In most cases, there are no logical clues in the event descriptions to allow you to figure out which one is which. So the whole "choice and consequence" approach in this game comes down to "trial and error until you get it right, followed by the same choice every time". This also hurts replayability. This game does have its strong sides of course: it has very good writing, a unique setting, decent art/sound, and an intriguing premise. But the core gameplay loop simply isn't there, and UI/UX is not set up for a roguelike experience. In a world with more good games than you can possibly play in a lifetime, this game just doesn't make the cut. One last picky point - sometimes there is French text instead of English in the UI/UX. This is a minor thing, but one of the places this happens is the "roll" button, which is the single most-clicked button in the game! Not sure how that one slipepd through!

Small little game - easy to learn hard to win.

Good, immersive

难度挺高，看一下攻略多尝试，还是艰难通关了

Spoiler alert: if you allow the peaceful religion to flourish they all murder you and end the game. Terrible game design.

The concept is fun but the game is designed for you to fail and crashes at the end of every turn

dure, mais juste et oui vaut mieux visé 80% que le minimum qui est + 50% de chance. PS: tout veut vous tuez ou presque, ne l'oublié pas.

Why is there no "mobile-port" tag? Plays and feels like one. At least they changed the tutorial / instructions to match playing on a PC. The resource management means the dice which you get from rolling your councillors dice - usually for the area / color they're strong in. So you get some dice per turn and barely manage to get enough dice of a specific color for the next ?random? event popping up. Then you wait for a story event happening and repeat ... Oh, and you get items ... brutally interresting ones giving +x to a color for your councillors. ... and you can reroll ... sometimes ... Not really getting anything out of this game, sorry ...

I really like the concept of this create your own adventure type game and even the resource generation element to handle various tasks. However, two components hold it back for me. The first is the dice mechanic, which is the main game-play mechanic. It is too easy to lose an important roll with +3 dice/ 79%+ chance of success. I understand it is supposed to be difficult, but some loses just feel cheap because of the mechanic. I'd prefer and an easy/casual mode that removed the roll/chance element (apart from obtaining dice), so I could enjoy the rest of the game without worrying about game ending bad rolls. The second thing that holds it back is the lack of variety in playthroughs. While you can recruit different advisers from the starting set, the list never changes nor do their strengths. Similarly, the random events that occur during the game are the same for every play through with the only random element being when they occur. This lack of uniqueness during subsequent playthroughs was a major let down for me. Since those two components are major parts of the game, I gave it a thumbs down. If you don't mind a tough game dependent on rng luck, it may be worth the relatively cheap price - especially when on sale.

Silmaris is a short and simple 'choose your own adventure' game with a decent story. The dice mechanic adds an element of risk/reward and managing production of dice and using them at the right time can be the deciding factor between winning and losing. Sometimes you'll make decisions that will lead to your downfall but the sessions are short enough that you won't mind too much starting from the beginning. Worth a shot if you like this sort of thing.