Dicey Dungeons, a tactical combat RPG

The spoiler policy for this LP is that anything's fair game to mention, on my side, and on yours. This includes the secret sixth (and seventh) character class. You've been warned

Designed by Terry Cavanagh of VVVVVV fame (not that I've played it), Dicey Dungeons is an elegant turn-based combat-focused single-character RPG with some roguelike trappings, i.e. procedural generation and permadeath. The titular dungeons are not explored as in, say, Nethack; instead, as in FTL: Faster Than Light, each floor consists of a series of beacons, and you must chart an optimal course between them. Unlike with FTL, the nature of each such beacon (enemy, healing, treasure chest, shop...) is apparent from the start; in particular, all enemy encounters are fixed and visible before you click on them. Thus, if you know that a certain critter would give you too much trouble to be worth its XP, you may delay or avoid its encounter entirely.

In combat, you roll a number of dice each turn, which fuel your equipment: the Broadsword deals the invested eyes + 2 as damage, the Battle Axe deals 2x the invested eyes but cannot take a 5 or 6, the Hall of Mirrors gives you +1 dice per turn for the rest of the battle but can only take a 6, etc. You choose how to assign them, reminiscent of assigning citizens in e.g. the Civilization games. Equipment can generally be used only once per turn, with some exceptions; some can also be charged by investing dice across multiple turns. Your enemies play by the same rules -- in fact, you can review their equipment and number of dice per turn at any time in combat.

This means that no information is deliberately withheld from the player: there are no hidden parameters or formulae, and at any point, you can make an informed estimate of the damage you will inflict or take this round. Which I think is wonderful.

The framing story is that five contestants on a game show (plus one late-comer) compete against our enticing and perhaps a little sadistic host, Lady Luck, who may or may not be rigging the rolls to her personal enjoyment. That's all you need to know. The contestants represent the available classes, each of which has quite different gameplay from the others. Each class also has a different Limit Break, a special ability that can be triggered every time that the character has taken at least X points of damage. In order of increasing difficulty:

• The Warrior, a happy-go-lucky athlete, enjoys large numbers, and can reroll up to three dice each turn, probably in service of that idea. His Limit Break, Fury, allows him to use a piece of equipment twice in a row.
• The Thief, a cynical meritocrat, enjoys large numbers of dice ("not the size of the boat, but the motion of the ocean"), and can use a randomly-picked piece of enemy equipment each turn. His Limit Break, Unlucky Roll, awards him four additional dice this turn, all of which will roll a 1.
• The Robot, a bubbly tryhard, does not roll all his dice at the start of the turn. Instead, he can produce one additional die on-demand as often as he wants, but must not exceed a certain sum total of eyes per turn (which increases with his level), or all his equipment segfaults. If he hits the target sum exactly, good stuff happens ("jackpot"). His Limit Break, Autoroll, awards him a combination of dice that exactly hits this target sum.
• The Inventor, another bubbly tryhard, transforms equipment into "gadgets" which do not require any dice investment, but must be discarded after each battle (because they've become boring, of course), and a new one created. In effect, managing your equipment becomes much more... interesting. Her Limit Break, Focus, turns every dice you haven't invested yet this turn into a 6.
• The Witch, a social media celebrity, almost plays a different game from everyone else. She has only four equipment slots instead of the usual six, and they are generally empty at the start of battle; instead, she can invest dice to draw "equipment" from her spellbook (you choose which eyes correspond to a spell when you learn it). In essence, each die asks you whether to invest it into new equipment for the battle, or using an established piece of equipment; that is, "who's the beatdown". As such, the Witch has the greatest potential for insane combos as well as for screwing up any given turn. She can throw excess dice at her enemy for 1HP of damage each. Her Limit Break, Ancestral Recall Crystal Ball, rolls three extra dice.
• The Jester, Lady Luck's disgruntled assistant, joins our band of heroes after beating him enough times in the dungeon. In a fantastic piece of storytelling, when you see him as an enemy, he appears to change his equipment at random every turn. Once you unlock him as a playable character, you'll be amazed to discover that this is because he's been playing Slay The Spire all along. He draws his active equipment from a deck, three at a time, draws a new one after each use, knows his next three draws, and can discard identical pieces. His Limit Break, Snap, allows him to use identically-named pieces of active equipment all at once with optimal dice that he pulls from his ass. In effect, Snap often allows you to go through your entire deck in a single turn. He's easier to play than the Witch in combat, but more difficult to make equipment decisions for (and, as with Slay the Spire, destroying your cards may also be what you need more than anything else.)
• There's a seventh class that's more of an easter egg, but you can't select it from the start. It's essentially a class change for the Thief, but plays more like the Warrior.

Each of these six characters is featured in six "episodes", each of which requires you to conquer a six-floor dungeon and buy six spider-shoes for sixpence each. The first of them introduces the character under their standard rules, the following two are character-specific challenges that introduce bizarre variants, the fourth one is the Elimination Round which makes enemies use upgraded versions of their usual equipment and increases their health, the fifth one is Parallel Universe which changes every piece of equipment and every status effect (!) to do something slightly different, and the sixth one is the Bonus Round, which introduces new game rules on each floor -- this is a bit like ADOM adding corruptions to your character as you proceed -- and also allows access to Hard Mode, which merges Bonus Round and Elimination Round and gives you worse starting equipment to boot). An episode takes roughly half an hour to complete, which is, in my opinion, just about perfect. Limit Breaks and class abilities may also vary across episodes.

If you beat all the Bonus Round episodes, you can try your hand at beating Lady Luck as the final boss in the Very Special Episode.

In essence, this is a tactic puzzle RPG that becomes more strategic once you've become acquainted with the enemies and equipment and know what to expect. Hopefully, I'll be able to convey how enjoyable it is.

This screenshot LP will begin by showing off the Thief's debut episode, since I think he makes for a more interesting introduction to the game than the Warrior, while still being representative of the "core rules". After that, I'll show off the Robot's Elimination Round, the Witch's Bonus Round, and the Jester's Parallel Universe. If there's interest to see more of the game afterwards, I'll hold a reader vote on what to cover.

Now, let the good times roll...

Episode 1: Hail to the Thief


Here's Floor 1, which takes place in a library. Fortunately, our level is not currently divisible by 5 without remainder.

The downstairs lead to the next floor; going back up is not possible, wherefore it's usually in your best interest to clear out the current level for XP and loot -- enemies will only get tougher. Floors 2 and 5 tend to be particular bottlenecks for reasons we'll probably get into. There's two monsters on this floor, a Gardener (highlighted) and Magician. The former is easier to defeat and also guards a treasure chest, which might just contain something helpful for the Magician battle, so let's take him out first. The level of the monster, by the way, simply corresponds to the XP it gives out, and has no other meaning. Once you level up, your HP are fully restored; this usually factors into the course you plot, and makes it so that skipping exactly one enemy in the dungeon is usually worse than skipping a few of them. The FFV jokes are setting up themselves, I swear.

Onward to glory:

The battle screen. Our equipment is arranged centrally, plus the Shovel we've, ahem, redistributed for this round via the Thief's innate class ability (one randomly-chosen enemy equipment can be used on your turn). The Limit Break gauge below our HP bar is empty, but will fill up as we take damage. Those little squares inside the equipment boxes eagerly await our dice, which we can drag and drop with the mouse.

Dicey Dungeons saves me a lot of busywork by explaining exactly what all the equipment does. Generally, equipment can only be used once per turn, but "(Reusable)" indicates that our Dagger does not play by this rule, thankfully, and we can slam our whole 3-2 roll into it to inflict five total damage.

The Lockpick is a utility weapon (usually indicated by a green border), which splits a die into two; the resulting combination is chosen at uniform random, i.e. a 6 could turn into any of 4-2, 3-3, or 5-1 with equal probability. The jackpot roll in that case is obviously 3-3 with our current equipment. Rolling a single 4 is better for us than rolling a single 3, yet 4-4, 4-5 and 4-6 are all only half as strong as 3-3.

The more equipment we amass, the more nuanced the Lockpick becomes, but right now, best practice is simply to shove any rolled 4, 5 or 6 into it, in descending order of importance. 4 never fails to produce a useful result (3-1 or 2-2), 5 could be 3-2 or 4-1 at 1/2 odds each, and 6 could be 3-3, 4-2 or 5-1 at 1/3 odds each. Since both 4-2 and 5-1 are worse than 3-2 for the Dagger, 5 is better than 6 for us at present. Enemies are also not threatening enough right now that gambling for 3-3 would be worth it under most circumstances, except if they're near death.

Anyhow, we've spent our dice for this turn. Let's see what our enemy does. He gets two dice per turn, as we can see above his HP bar. His only equipment is the Shovel we've pilfered, by the way, but he gets it back on his turn. This is a very straightforward enemy -- he tries to roll a six, for which the chance is 1 - (5/6)^2 ~= 30%.

Swing and a hit. In consequence, the Shovel teaches us our first status effect: Weaken, which downgrades a random piece of the enemy's equipment temporarily on their next turn.

It turns out to afflict our Dagger, as can be seen from the minus sign behind the name (the upgraded version would be called "Dagger+", and there is only one stage of upgrade/downgrade -- you could think of it as blessed/uncursed/cursed, if you want). As a result, 3 is no longer eligible for it, but we could have split a 3 into 2-1 neatly with the Lockpick. Of course, Weaken still would have made all rolls above 3 look notably worse, so I'm thankful for Lady Luck's intercession here.

Incidentally, the Limit Break gauge is about 3/4 full from the 6 damage we took. You can hover over the Limit Break gauge to see how much damage it takes to fill it, by the way (which scales with your level). It's apparent that the Gardener's next turn will probably push us over the edge, unless he gets very unlucky with a 2-1 or such.

His next turn lacks a 6. Enemies try to optimize their turns (with some blind spots I'll address as they come up), and his best die appears to have been a 3:

The Limit Break (which rolls four extra dice, all 1s) is now available, but since the gauge carries over between battles and we've already got the resources to whack this rabbit, I'm saving it for the Magician. With the Dagger, it's essentially a four-damage button right now, and we can already guess that this won't scale well into the endgame, so not only are high rolls an immediate concern for improvement, but we'll have to find something for 1s in the midgame as well. An eyepatch, so to speak.

Hopefully, we're not following this white rabbit anytime soon. What was he guarding?

A decent early-game item. Health regeneration isn't usually a good idea (with some notable exceptions), especially since the superior Shield and Reduce effects exist, but for now, this gives our 5s something to do and any equipment is better than no equipment. It benefits from the Unlucky Roll as well, since we need to lose HP to activate it in the first place and a stray 1HP of damage is often more relevant to us than to enemies.

The fight for the downstairs commences:

The Magician can be a danger in the Elimination Round / Hard Mode, since Magic Missile+ inflicts an impressive 8 damage and his shield also gets harder to pierce (4, iirc). The Shield X status effect absorbs the next X points of damage and persists between turns, making it almost strictly better than healing. It is bypassed, most notably, by Poison effects, but still often useful to have around.

Hilariously, though, I manage to roll the only combination of two dice that can kill him in one turn (when not pilfering the Missile, that is), and the Lockpick plays nice by making the 3-3 split a reality.

We ascend to experience level 2, which means a full heal, +4HP and...

An extra die. Level-up rewards are generally not random, but if they're equipment, it might vary across runs depending on the episode you're playing.


Floor 2, apparently home to a Marshmallow, Dryad, and Sneezy. The Dryad is probably the least dangerous of these three; she attempts to rack up Poison with one weapon, and also has a generic "sword" weapon (i.e. a WYSIWYG damage generator that accepts any one die) that heals +2 on a 6 -- compare the Gardener's Shovel. The Marshmallow can output rather dangerous damage, since it essentially has two "swords", one of which also inflicts Freeze, a candidate for the generally strongest status effect in the game. His main weakness is that one of these "swords" takes only odd inputs and the other only even inputs, and he has no utility weapons to fix his mere two dice per turn. The Sneezy has four rather inefficient countdown weapons made much more dangerous by his utility weapon that takes two identical dice (1-1, 2-2, ...) and reduces all his countdowns by the corresponding number (1, 2, ...). Every time he rolls 6-6, you're in for a good 12 damage. As such, we probably want to fight him second such that we level up after his fight. If we battle the Marshmallow first and come out in good shape, we might not even need these apples (which are, surprise, healing items -- but you can't take them with you to later floors, you must eat them on the spot; the damage they heal scales with your level) and can save them for after the Dryad fight, such that we will enter Floor 3 at full health.

That little wagon in the centre is a shop. It sells equipment and sometimes apples (which heal a bit more HP than "wild" ones) or upgrades.

Incidentally, certain monsters use the treasure chest and apple sprite on the map (the Mimic and Rotten Apple, respectively). It's good practice to mouse over all of those on any given Floor, which will reveal any such mischief (total floor XP not adding up as they should will also give it away). None such in our case, though.

Good initial roll against the Marshmallow. I toss the 6 into the stolen Fireball. The Burn X effect makes you pay a 2HP toll to use each of your highest X dice that turn. Oftentimes, the most notable effect thereof will be fueling your Limit Break, but it's not always a laughing matter, and there are several enemies kitted out to make better use of it than the Marshmallow (the Pirate comes to mind). The enemies will always decide to take Burn damage unless it would be lethal, which essentially makes this deal 8 damage.


Unlucky Roll in action. With the Fireball burn, it's rather likely that we can fire it again next turn, unless he doesn't roll an even die, in which case we'll be at least 2 damage short and probably still unable to roast him.


6-5 is the best possible roll for the Marshmallow, and it stings. The Freeze X status changes your highest X dice for the turn into 1s, inflicting psychological damage as you watch it take away all your good stuff. Of course, the Thief is relatively unfazed by being robbed of excess sixes, but other classes tend not to enjoy it. Many enemies also don't; if I could consistently inflict Freeze 2 on this Marshmallow, it would deal 1HP (plus Freeze 1) every turn and nothing else.


Fortunately, we happen to steal the Snowball next turn. With that in hand and not least courtesy of the 2HP of Burn damage he's taken, splitting that 6 now has a 2/3 chance (instead of 1/3) to give us immediate victory; only 4-2 would flounder hard.

You might be wondering what happens if you Lockpick a 1. The answer is that the game rounds up, and gives you 1-1 in return. This can be wonderful if you have additional dice transmuters or just weapons that care about doubles or 1s specifically, but it's rather marginal in our situation, as there's almost always something better to use the split on.

Lady Luck favours us. I click Unlucky Roll and bring the Marshmallow to exactly 0HP.


Here's what the shopkeeper has for sale. I tend to forget her name. Bump doesn't do much in our situation -- we'd much rather have a weapon that gives -1 value. The Snake Eye Charm is rather cool with e.g. the Spatula, which flips dice to their opposite side, for many load-outs, but it doesn't help us much, either, although the Thief can pick up an item that reduces all countdowns when he reaches level 3: the Crowbar. With only 3 gold in the bank, though, I'd much rather buy the Counterfeit and make our 3s (and, by extension, everything that can potentially be Lockpicked to produce one) yield one extra 3 damage per turn. The Counterfeit is mostly held back, if at all, by its increased size -- it takes up two of six total slots of active equipment. The Counterfeit's upgrade, in fact, doesn't change its effect at all; instead, it simply reduces its size.


Sneezy here is allergic to dungeons (the game's joke, not mine), and his equipment is essentially pilfer-proof because we can't make much use of it. He's very dangerous on Hard Mode, where the Sneeze equipment stops caring about which doubles are inserted and simply reduces every countdown to zero on the spot, and every Spike deals 4 damage. In this case, I should still have picked up an apple before the battle, as it turns out.


Our initial roll could have been better. In fact, it could not have been much worse, but there's a 4 to split, which turns out to give us 3-1.


I decide to use the Bandage on 5-1 instead of feeding the latter to the Dagger, but this is also where I notice that this would been more meaningful if I had consumed an apple beforehand. Instead, he still has a chance to kill us with 6-6 on two turns in a row. What are the odds of that?

((3 choose 2) * (1/6) ^ 2 * (1 - 1/6) ^ (3-2))^2 ~= (7%)^2 = 0.49%. That's probably fine, but I've still played inaccurately unless we'd be missing that apple after the Dryad battle, which is not that likely.

On the other hand, if he draws that 7% 6-6 now, the two Bandage applications leave us at 7HP, and the maximal damage he can inflict without 6-6 is 6, so it was still a good move.

lol


Stealing Sneeze this turn annoys me much more than last turn's Hail Satan, since Spike would have allowed a guaranteed kill with these dice, comically useless as it generally is.

But more to the point,

if I hadn't invested the 1 into a Bandage, it would also have sufficed. It might have been better to Dagger first, since the chance of not having an odd die available for Bandage after a full Spike barrage are zero, given that it sets off the Limit Break. Misplayed.

Winning the battle advances the Thief to XP level 3, with another +4HP and...

I like that you get to choose. More games should have something like this.

Poison X inflicts X damage to you at the start of your turn, then decrements X by 1. Like every status effect, it stacks, and multiple Poison attacks per round can certainly be very dangerous (even the Haunted Jar is a potential game-ender on Hard Mode), but 3 per turn isn't enough to warrant using a worse Dagger. The Crowbar is generally good to take: if you amass countdown weapons from treasure chests and buy one or two from shops, you'll likely have a reasonable setup (and sometimes it'll be hilariously "broken"), although upgrading the Crowbar will often be essential to success with it.


This is a much better piece of equipment than the Crowbar or Bandage currently. I promptly neglect to equip it for the entire next floor of encounters.

To demonstrate that Dicey Dungeons doesn't hide elemental / status effect resistances or weaknesses from the player, either.


The Dryad's loadout, as mentioned earlier. Pilfered equipment "resets" at the start of every turn, making countdown weapons rather useless to steal (not that you can influence this), since the investment doesn't carry over between turns, which their effect is generally balanced around.


The Dryad does manage to hit me with Poison 4 once before she bites it, but this roll ends up feeding the Bandage for enough that the second apple I had saved becomes useless (they regenerate 6HP at this stage).


Floor 3. From left to right: Pirate, Haunted Jar, Yeti. The Pirate is more dangerous if you find him on Floor 2, where he can sometimes have effectively two swords (because his "sword" becomes reusable once on investing a 4), as well as inflict Burn two times per turn, but at this stage, and with two apples available before him, I don't find him concerning. The Haunted Jar has a Poison attack and a 24-countdown weapon that doubles your Poison counter; this is generally non-threatening, but his Poison resistance makes him a situational killer of characters that focus on inflicting Poison themselves -- they'll lose that damage race. The Yeti is moderately dangerous -- he has two Ice Shards (same as the Marshmallow's Snowball, essentially) and a unique weapon that freezes all your dice on 1-1, making him one of the enemies that you probably don't want to inflict Freeze on yourself.

The Haunted Jar guards the two apples and a free equipment upgrade (the anvil), so he's the first target. After that, we'll see how much damage we've taken and choose our next target accordingly. If it's high enough that the Pirate isn't a problem, it's probably best to tackle him first, level up, and heal with the apples only after the Yeti fight.

The Haunted Jar is one of the less interesting enemies. I end up at 22HP, which is good enough to beat the Pirate, and decide to investigate that treasure chest before committing to a weapons upgrade, although the Dagger+ is a pretty safe pick for the Thief.

Here's a first: splitting a 2. I do this to use the Bandage with the results and because I had nothing better.

Cannon Fire is a Fire-elemental attack, which doesn't matter to us, but several dangerous enemies are innately weak to fire (more than for any other element), such that it might be a good idea to buy and carry a Fire weapon in reserve.

After this fight, the Thief hits XP level 4, picking up another extra die per turn.

As well as this tool of vigilante justice. There's some overlap between enemy and player equipment in this game; you've seen this on the Dryad before. The Crowbar has risen in value already, but this alone doesn't make me want to upgrade it.

I go for my bog standard play instead. The Dagger+ effectively doubles our Limit Break rate, which is fantastic already, but in addition to that, it strengthens both the Lockpick and the Counterfeit, as extra dice now provide value in and of themselves. Since it's also our only direct source of damage and reusable, we're sure to get massive value out of this upgrade every turn for the rest of the episode.

The initial roll against the Yeti goes badly, and while splitting the 6 technically gives us better dice on average than splitting the 4 because of that pilfered Ice Shard, we might not want to give him (even) better odds to land Ice Age, although it's not that bad a fate with the Dagger+.


Praise the Dagger+. This is a killing blow.


The shop's selection is forgettable. The Healing Crystal is worse than the Bandage, since every 2 or 3 goes into the Dagger+ for sure. I ponder taking that cheap First Aid Kit for possible Crowbar use, since healing effects tend to make sense when bundled with Poison, but decide to hope for good shops on Floors 4 and 5 instead (Floor 6 just has the boss encounter and nothing else), even though 1 gold is probably not going to deny me any opportunities.

The Last Stand is a rather poor weapon for that price, since you'll just get killed by the next encounter instead. It also doesn't help you against Poison, chain Burn, or Lock/Blind/Weaken...

Floor 4. From left to right: Rhino Beetle (bullies you with strong physical attacks), Handyman (uses a Shock sword every turn, a bit out of his depth), Kraken (bane of the Elimination Round, and probably the monster I've died to most often). The apples practically dictate the route here (Rhino Beetle last), but if I had been at low health and in Hard Mode, choosing the Beetle first to hope for a shop apple might have been the play.

What's that greenish wagon for?

I'm not certain that Dicey Dungeons biases Val to suggest an insipid trade deal in roughly 95% of circumstances, but it's safe to assume that it does. The Glass Cauldron is decent as such (and the Witch tends to like it), but the Thief doesn't really need help with rolling 1s and, more pertinently, we certainly don't want to lose the Lockpick. Moving on.


The Handyman's loadout is the Inventor's starting toolkit in her debut episode, if I remember right. The Spanner is great fun for the player, but he hardly has a use for it besides ensuring that he gets a 6 every turn, upon which he inflicts this status with his "sword":


Shock 1, which makes you pay for using a certain piece of equipment (rather than a certain die, as Burn does). Often negligible when you afflict enemies with it, since they tend to roll more dice than they can use, although there are exceptions.

You can also see that I've finally managed to equip the Leather Armor. It essentially replaces the Bandage, which is still around because the Crowbar is even less relevant to our current toolkit.

The Kraken gets 5 (!) dice per turn, and tries to get you entangled in an endurance match by obscuring your dice (Blind status) until his deceptively good melee weapon grows to unmanageable output per turn. This tends to work much better on Elimination Round / Hard Mode; this version can inflict Blind only half as often per turn, and his clock is too slow. I've still died to the upgraded Kraken often enough that even the base form certainly heightens my awareness; it's particularly nasty because Dicey Dungeons is generally designed around not withholding information from you.

Curse X status makes your equipment have a 1/2 chance of failing to produce your effect, then decrements X by 1. It's as awful to play through as it sounds.

Since you go first in (almost) every battle, having an active Limit Break when you encounter the (upgraded) Kraken is a good idea -- get your best shot in before he blinds all your dice.

A typical turn against the Kraken generally involves testing your blinded dice, or a revealed one that you know to be relatively irrelevant, against some less valuable equipment. If the Dagger+ triggers Curse, there goes the Thief's damage output, whereas the Bandage will hardly be missed. (Incidentally, Countdown equipment does poorly against Blind unless you can brute-force it with a Crowbar.) If you try to invest a blinded die illegally, it won't take, so I can test for even dice with the Leather Armor, for instance.

Blind is perhaps the most interesting status effect to play around, but if you have a weapon that takes more than one die as input, you can just put a blinded die into that and it'll tell you the aggregate damage, which I find hilarious.

Lockpicking or duplicating blinded dice gives you additional blinded dice, by the way -- Blinded spreads to a die's "descendants".

Duplicating that 2 is safer than cloning a blinded dice that's just as likely to be eligible for the Dagger than not, at least as long as there's only one Lockpick to use per turn. It turns out that both of these dice are less than 4, so this is the Kraken's final turn, having inflicted a grand total of 3 damage. The base form really isn't threatening, but he might be back in the Robot's Elimination Round, and guess how much the Robot, whose equipment shuts down if he draws dice exceeding a certain total value, enjoys not knowing his rolls. (The Blinded effect obscures his "CPU" gauge for the turn; no easy way out.)

Lock X disables the first X dice you draw. Like Blind (and unlike Freeze/Burn), it doesn't seek out your most valuable dice. The Rhino Beetle is nasty, as he deals consistently good damage per turn, no tricks required. If you compare him to the Kraken, you can see how much this game strives for distinguishing its encounters in battle.


The Rhino Beetle fortunately is another one of these enemies weak to his own tools. Turn One blocks what would have been a perfect turn for him by locking down a 6.

The average aggregate roll for two dice is 7, of course, but in practice, he would have prioritized the axe with rolls like 4-3, and come up short on the Headbutt. No use griping over that, though.

The Rhino Beetle gave us the requisite XP to reach level 5, so here comes the reward (apart from the full heal and +4HP, you know that drill by now):

The Hacksaw is amazing with our current kit; the worst way it can split a 6 for us is 4-1-1, which we can still transmute into 3-3-1-1-1 for 14 points of damage, a 3HKO on most enemies around here. That's from one die (if also three equipment, not counting the Dagger+). It's the pick I make.

The Counterfeit+ upgrade isn't needed yet, as we can simply ditch the Bandage and perhaps the Leather Armor before equipment slots become a real constraint. The Skeleton Key is, of course, the most stylish choice, but the only doubles we can guarantee consistently is a 1 on Limit Breaks, and setting all dice to 1 doesn't help us a lot compared to Lockpick/Hacksaw/Counterfeit.

The shop happens to sell a tool that you can probably imagine working well with a Crowbar/Skeleton Key loadout, though. I should probably have bought something here, such as that lovely Hookshot (which is beastly when upgraded), but figured I might need my gold to buy whatever might be sold on Floor 5, and these were ultimately non-essentials. It might have been interesting to read about a new tool in action, though, if nothing else.


Floor 5, and if this were Hard Mode, it would be a horror show. I've died to all three of these monsters at least once before. As it stands, I do regret not buying the damn Staff since the Snowman is weak to Fire-elemental damage and generally a dangerous enemy when you can't inflict that.


This is why. Of course, with the Dagger+, Freeze is a dubious obstacle to us, but most characters hate getting hit with high damage + Freeze 2-3 every single turn. He's probably also better at using Freeze than you are, and Freeze is a rather good strategy against many enemies otherwise (consider a Rhino Beetle fight where we'd had a Glass Cauldron instead of a Lockpick).


After clicking Unlucky Roll and Counterfeiting a 3, I'm still far from the largest number of dice I've had available in a single turn, and for that matter, my record is not held by the Thief. The Snowman drops to 12HP before he gets his first turn. Upgrade the Dagger.


He doesn't have much luck with his own roll, not that it matters much because Lockpicking / Hacksawing from any given roll gets us the T2 victory here, but it's nice to avoid his potentially concerning damage output (note the Leather Armor completely protecting us). If he rolls 5-3-5-x twice and you lack shields, you're probably in trouble.

For the record, Snowball+ deals +1 additional damage, like the Dagger+.

This is a very decent Poison strategy enabler which I occasionally employ with the Jester. There's no reason to change our toolkit now, though.


As though we weren't already strong enough, the game tosses another Lockpick our way, which I'm only too happy to take. Also pictured: a shop apple and the somewhat dubious Iron Armor (imagine what happens if you try to rely on it in a Snowman fight, for instance).

The Singer blocks access to two apples and an upgrade, so she's next:


Before and after our patented hacksaw treatment. You have to respect the thief's class ability, too, probably the most subtle advantage of his, coming in to pick up the one die I would otherwise have no use for.

Here's the Singer's moveset. High Note can certainly screw you up after she's racked up the damage and Weaken 2 every turn. Incidentally, I don't think any enemy is weak or resistant to Earth-elemental damage.

In our case, the stolen Sad Verse downgrades one of her own; Sad Verse- does not inflict Weaken, and thus we only have to deal with one diminished piece of equipment.

Which turns out not to matter, as we use the Hacksaw on 6 almost exclusively, anyhow. I don't know by heart what most equipment does when downgraded, but several Floor 5 enemies and a certain boss rely on Weaken, and if you happen to know that a piece of equipment is relatively immune to Weaken, that'll certainly help.

The 5 happily splits into 3-2, and with that on top of the magic of another stolen Sad Verse, we will probably win the battle and lose the war once her record label's copyright lawyers have sued us to oblivion.

I could also have spent the upgrade on a Lockpick+, and probably should have, as the Leather Armor is rather marginal at this point. Shrinking down your equipment is often a good play, though -- not many upgrades make as much of a difference as the Dagger's compared to that of your next-best equipment in the backpack (unless it's just a stash of Poison-inflicting mediocrities).

Here's the Gargoyle's moveset in his basic form. I've never lost to him, I think, but the friend who recommended me this game considers his upgraded form the bane of his Elimination Rounds, and I can acknowledge that -- the similar Rat King has one-upped me once too often.

To compensate for his large number of re-rolls per turn, though, he gets a mere 2 dice per turn to begin with, and this makes him weak to Freeze (his counter-Glare will probably not stop your engine, slow as it might become), as well as...

Lockpick/Counterfeit plus his own Glare, which makes him unable to do anything for a turn. Locking all of an enemy's dice gives you an achievement, by the way, which unlocks an enemy "biography" associated with it. I suspect that most players who obtain it have run into this exact situation. The second turn goes the same, and he doesn't get a third.

Saving the worst for last.

Silence prevents you from using your class abilities and your Limit Break that turn, although you can invest any two dice to break it (which is a steep price, especially given what most Limit Breaks do). Some classes suffer worse than others; the Thief doesn't care that much, fortunately. By contrast, if Silence hits the Witch, she can't use her spellbook. Yeah. The fight is made worse by Echo Blast weakening her active spells with much greater precision (since she has only four slots; the Witch usually answers Weaken by swapping in new equipment from her spellbook) and that Dodge ability.

By this point, I wish I had picked a more difficult episode for the introduction. Next time. This fight takes us to the final experience level; I'm sure you're shocked to learn that it's 6. The reward is an extra die; we now get five per turn regularly.

The final obstacle is a girl scout with a surprisingly dangerous pocket knife. It's an RPG alright.

It's a worse Dagger+, but this is the weapon before its upgrade.

If nothing else, the takeaway from this episode should be that green-bordered equipment and reusable weapons are wonderful. This is still not even close to peak dice; let's see if I get to reproduce that in the LP.

Incidentally, I used the Leather Armor T1, which I shouldn't have; it had a net negative return on health by delaying our victory for a turn (instead, I Armored up again on T2).

Lady Luck invites us to spin the wheel as our prize for besting the episode. Will we win fortune and fame?

The LP format somewhat ruins the effect and I'm too lazy to make a GIF here, but I assure you that the wheel spins and then lands on this super rad skull field.

...is that meant to be bad?

Find out on the next episode of Dicey Dungeons!

I played this game in alpha and then slept on the full release, but I may have to remedy that someday.

That's right, I should have mentioned: the game was originally made for a seven-day roguelike game jam (this may have been the jam's title, verbatim), and I think the earliest build is still available for free on itch.io. I've also missed the Halloween Special, which I've been told changed every battle into a puzzle. Perhaps this year...?

Episode 2.1: Robot Elimination Round (Floors 1-4)


Welcome to another episode of Yume Nikki Dicey Dungeons. The game tracks your win/loss record for any given episode, which affects nothing except for my pride. Only my very fragile pride.

You can usually expect to die at most twice before winning any one for the first time. That said, two of them took me a dozen tries each (Inventor Elimination Round and Witch Hard Mode), and -- to whet your appetites -- this one will be not quite as smooth sailing as the Thief's gentle introduction.


Floor 1. The Magician is back, and will be our first target. The Frog sports a shield and a Broadsword+, which deals the invested dice (unrestricted) + 3 damage. That would be a good weapon for us, and it's rather deadly by itself at this stage -- the Magician is almost sure to get a Magic Missile+ in against the Robot, dealing 8 damage, which means that a Frog that survives our T2 only needs to roll 5 or 6 on both of his to end the run right there. That's a bit better than a 25% chance. Of course, the Robot might have a few tricks up his coating to avoid this fate.


The upgraded Magician. The 10% health boost to enemies gets rounded down, so he's still sitting at 9HP total.


The Robot's combat interface. He doesn't roll any dice automatically, nor does he roll a fixed number of dice per turn. Instead, he creates his dice on-demand, one by one, by pressing Calculate. If the sum total of eyes created this turn exceeds the "CPU target", all equipment immediately becomes unusable for the remainder of the turn ("error"). If we hit the CPU target exactly, it's called a jackpot and we can choose one of three notably beneficial effects, but we can also not Calculate any more dice on that turn. That latter clause may not seem like a restriction right now, but there is some equipment that is immune to errors or decreases the CPU gauge, which makes jackpots sometimes undesirable, particularly as the effects don't scale that well into the midgame.

The Ray Gun resembles the Dagger for utility, but due to how the Robot works, we can't really get more than one, maybe two productive uses out of it per turn right now (if we roll 3-4-3, for instance, we'll error out). The Plasma Blaster fulfills a double role, as it makes both our 2s and 5s more relevant to combat. We'll see its applications throughout this update. Note that our starting toolset has little use for repeated 2s, and 6s are none too efficient with the CPU gauge looming, either (it's much better to roll 5-4 here than 6-2-1; the previous episode's Thief would certainly disagree).


The robot thinks VERY HARD to produce the number 5, after which there's already a 1/3 chance of the next "calculation" zapping our equipment. Since we have a good use for it -- thus fueled, the Plasma Blaster takes off half the Magician's health -- I decide to invest it immediately. Unfortunately, I proceed to draw a useless 2 (pictured), followed by a 4 that exceeds the CPU total (sum 11); with nothing more to do, I pass the turn to him.

The Magician rolls a 1, which translates to Shield 4, protecting him from what would have been a decisive blow on our T2, and allowing him to cast a retaliatory Magic Missile+. The upgraded Missile is a great piece of equipment, since harvesting 8 damage from every individual 2 and 4 is well above par (6 usually conveys better effects, although this is a decent outlet nonetheless).

A reminder: Shield X absorbs the next X points of attack damage, which includes damage taken from extinguishing your Burning dice (but not Poison, notably), so our 5-invested Plasma Blaster reduces the enemy Shield 4 to zero and inflicts one point of "piercing" damage, which would have mattered if the next die had been a 3 or 4 (it wasn't). Since intact Shield counts persist between turns, whittling them down quickly is a good idea.

The Missile's 8 damage readies our Limit Break, Autoroll, which we're saving for the Frog battle.


In another FTL parallel, Shields save your life. Even adding a total of 3 Shield over 2t would already negate the Frog's chance of a kill against our current HP total within that same turn-span. Of course, the Limit Break will turn out to make this unnecessary in practice, but that doesn't change that our weakness to small dice values has been patched.


The Frog is one of the more dangerous Floor 1 encounters, and serves as the introductory "knight"-type enemy; our current equipment is pushing us towards a similar style. A 3-2 roll or worse on his part is rather unlikely, so he can use an attack that's essentially Magic Missile+ while boosting his shield on the same turn.


I roll 1-1-4 before hitting Autoroll, which adds another 2-1 and brings up the Jackpot menu. The choice is clear here: 4 damage from the Plasma Blaster and 5 from the Lucky Shot delivers the OHKO, porting us to experience level 2; this increases the CPU target from 9 to 11, which is much appreciated: we can now support three dice more often than not.


Floor 2. That Stereohead gets the equivalent of two Plasma Blasters that additionally inflict Weaken, but he's unlikely to defeat any character outright -- expect some consistent damage, though (unless you can hit his weakness with Shock-elemental damage, in which case he's a pushover). I'm concerned by the prospect of fighting a Wizard or -- even worse -- Sneezy right afterwards with no healing, and saving the Sneezy for last is not a good idea in the first place (too much damage to recover with apples), so I decide to attack the Sneezy first to access the apple, and perhaps another one from that shop. I believe that shop apples are more common on the deeper Floors, but I've never kept close track.


I was mistaken about the Spike+ inflicting 4 damage instead of 3; it has a reduced countdown instead, which never matters, as he will launch them all with Sneeze+ anyhow. There's a 42% chance of rolling arbitrary doubles with three dice, and the Sneezy has enough health to survive for two turns, perhaps even three. Taking 24 damage, or even 36, is well within the question here, and we still have to defeat the Stereohead afterwards (that apple will only heal 5HP). Incidentally, one of the possible Hard Mode floor rules is every attack (i.e. your own and your enemies') gaining +1 damage, which is probably why I remembered having taken a 4-damage Spike barrage before.


It seems that AI isn't going to take over for a while longer yet. I decide that 3 more damage to him is more relevant than 1 more point of Shield, but that's all I can do here. The Plasma Blaster consuming a 2 here is already optimal, since a 3 can be fed to the Ray Gun and anything higher would error out. The next roll is a 4.


The first syllable of the Name has been articulated. The Small Shield dampens this assault to 10 damage, which is still concerning, but it also readies our Limit Break. Excelsior!


Having drawn another fantastic series of dice (2-2-2), I click Autoroll, adding a 5; this is less than savoury, but after that initial roll, there was no chance of a 2HKO anyhow. The next Sneeze salvo still can't kill us, and all we need is a 5 plus another single die eligible for the Ray Gun from the T3 Autoroll, so Lucky Shot it is.

Incidentally, the Sneezy is meant to clue you in that a Crowbar(+) setup might pay off even with subpar countdown weapons. If you manage to sport the really good ones (Plasma Cannon+, Meteor)...


The second syllable of the Name has been articulated. The Robot emerges at 8HP remaining. But surely he won't...?


Amazing. Note the unused Autoroll; this was a natural "jackpot" which I would rather not have arrived at (not that pressing Autoroll would have given a different result here). Make no mistake; that 10% health bonus to all enemies makes itself felt. With the Plasma Blaster still available, rolling an extra die is strictly worse than the Lucky Shot -- and neither will KO, so the only choice is Regenerate to 11HP and invest another Shield 2, barely enough to keep us alive until T4, when we are certain to kill.


The third syllable of the Name has been articulated. I wish this had been a 6-6-6 roll again, but close enough. This is his last turn, obviously.

The apple he was guarding with his unholy life brings us back to 6HP, which means that the Stereohead needs two attacks to kill us instead (in fairness, probably three, thanks to the Small Shield), but it's looking grim if yon shoppe can't ameliorate our toolkit.


Which it can.

In good health, I would have bought the Bumpblade here, but we need every shield or healing effect that we can find or afford to survive the next battle. It helps that we've found a candidate for the best one available. The Forcefield is laughably undercosted at 1 gold; it turns every single of our 1 or 2 rolls into an asset, much like the Dagger+, while not being entirely reliant on them, and it does this without even consuming most of them. What's more, it benefits from the Bumpblade, which provides a way to "cheat" parity requirements.

If the Bumpblade weren't value-capped at 5, inserting a 6 would indeed yield 6-1. The green-bordered Bump, sans blade, allows you to pull that trick; we will probably see it on a Warrior episode.


I roll 3-5, click Autoroll, and add 2-1. The dice could not have been more kind. I invest the 2 into the Small Shield and the 1 into the Forcefield for a total Shield 7 (!), and the rest into our weapons, adding a Lucky Shot. Thus the result.


For his part, the Stereohead gets the second-worst possible roll, but "in fairness", any roll that included a 6 would have been good enough, as would 2-2 or worse, so we probably had about a ~50% overall chance of a meaningful Shield advantage. Shield surpasses healing effects largely because (1) strong Shield effects tend to be cheaper by dice investment than strong healing effects, and (2) the advantage gained from an unlucky enemy roll is less susceptible to being equalized right away by Weaken, Shock, and other such effects.


On T2, we roll 5-2 before getting into error range, and our Plasma Blaster is Weakened. I invest the 5 into the Ray Gun rather than a +3 Forcefield since the odds of drawing a usable die are still in our favour, and Shield 5 is already sufficient to protect us for another turn. It's not likely he'll survive to his T3. The next calculation is a 2, which goes into the Plasma Blaster, and then another 2 to give us a Lucky Shot jackpot.

The Stereohead's roll is an anticlimactic 6-1, and the Robot reaches Level 3. Happy days and jubilation!

The Buster Sword effectively yields +1 die in addition to being a sword, and we're currently stuck with "knight" equipment (red-bordered weapons + shields), where it fits in well. It's a good outlet for any given 6, too, which we've previously struggled to find a use for. The Ray Gun is certainly going out of style; note that, despite it having the greater average damage output from a random die, the Robot's innate rules encourages tying large dice values to "large effects", and the Ray Gun goes against this strategy.

The Ultima Weapon can be a good choice -- generally, it plays better the more dice manipulation or Fury (use the same move twice) equipment you have, and its upgrade causes it to deal triple damage on a jackpot, iirc (the Buster Sword just picks up an additive bonus, although this is still useful since, by its nature, it's going to be used every turn).

I also purchase the Bumpblade, but do not equip it until Floor 3. I think I should have done it already, as the Ray Gun doesn't exactly have a good chance of dealing more damage on any given turn; we'd need to draw something like 3-3-4 or 3-4-4, and even that is marginal.

The Wizard is mainly constrained by his one die per turn, but his Hall of Mirrors+ spell, which he will prioritize whenever it's legal, puts you on a serious clock. That Freeze spell threatens many characters at this stage, although we are not one of them; think about what happens if the Robot gets all his dice frozen.


Our first turn is 5-6 (jackpot). That's a potential 16 damage, but we can probably not repeat this feat on T2 to surmount his remaining 14HP, which would require two Ray Gun dice plus a 4/5 for the Plasma Blaster plus a good Buster Sword "extra" roll, so I decide to take the extra die effect from the jackpot menu for the first time. It serves up a 2; I had hoped for an odd die for the Forcefield, but this still converts to a fine Shield 2, which will conserve some health for Floor 3. With the Bumpblade equipped instead of the Ray Gun, a 6 would have fizzled and I would probably have chosen Lucky Shot instead.

Incidentally, the dice returned by the Bumpblade is not treated as another dice roll, so it doesn't fuel the Forcefield.


MISTAKE.


It bears repeating: the Forcefield costs 1 gold. Incidentally, there's an achievement for rolling ten 1s in a row, and you'll probably obtain it either from the Wizard or the Yeti while playing the Robot.

His own roll is a 2, which he invests into a Hall of Mirrors. T3 involves a bit of a puzzle:


What shall we do with this 1? If we invest it into the Plasma Blaster, a subsequent 5 or 6 will KO via the Buster Sword, a 4 will KO via Lucky Shot, and a 3 will KO via Ray Gun + subsequent jackpot or Buster Sword, no matter what; a subsequent 2 has a 1/3 chance (still needs 5 or 6). If we keep it in hand, a 4 will KO via Lucky Shot and subsequent Blaster just the same, a 3 will KO via Ray Gun + Plasma Blaster + subsequent jackpot or Buster Sword, and a 2 will KO via Plasma Blaster + nearly any follow-up. An additional 1 has the same effect on either route.

This isn't hard to play right, but I like that sometimes it's the correct play to shove a 1 into the Plasma Blaster, depending on the current CPU gauge. Of course, it also shows that I'm a scrub for not equipping the Bumpblade, which would inflict 1, return 2, and leave 2-1-2 as the only sequence of rolls that would still miss the KO.


Case in point, the roll goes 1-2-4. Not that there's much of a reason to care behind Shield 15, except that he knows, and indeed manages to cast, a Poison spell. After a jackpot and choosing Regenerate, the remaining apple can restore our health back to full, though.


The Mechanical Arm mirrors the Forcefield as a weapon, and it performs just as well with low-value dice and (later) CPU-decrementing equipment. The two don't even compete for resources: one Bumpblade is enough to serve both. With the Plasma Blaster and Buster Sword taking care of high-value dice in turn, I'm feeling rather confident about our equipment heading downstairs.


Floor 3. True to his name, the Fireman in the centre is a weaker version of the Snowman (2x Fireball instead of 4x Snowball) that appears earlier. This is your clue that Freeze is generally stronger than Burn, incidentally. The Marshmallow is somewhat out of its depth, too, so I'm expecting a rather safe journey; the Fireman is clearly our first target.


Is a Calculate appropriate here? We stand to lose six damage (1/6 odds) and gain two (5/6); but we can expect to land 3 dice totalling roughly 10 eyes every turn regardless, not counting the Buster Sword extra, and with his up to 4 Burns per turn, we should get at least one Autoroll, so we should be able to kill by dealing 10 + 15 on T2 + T3, whereas even Autoroll Lucky Shot won't quite deal 22 dmg in one turn. I decide to play it safe.


We do indeed deal ~30 damage over the next two turns, 20 thereof on T2. His second roll turns out rather unlucky for him. In the T3 screenshot, the Buster Sword subtly strikes again: after rolling 6-1, it's safe to click Calculate since an error would mean a lethal Sword, and anything else ticks the Mechanical Arm up to lethal; the Bumpblade, meanwhile, ensures that we don't have to worry about parity.

At 22HP, I feel rather confident taking on a Marshmallow on Floor 3 without healing beforehand. Our current equipment would mostly just lose parity conditions when upgraded, which is pointless with the Bumpblade, and the Bumpblade+ just gains an extra use per turn, which is also pointless since we don't have enough parity conditions for that to matter, either. The Buster Sword's upgrade (+2 damage) makes sense, but I don't think it's urgent; I decide to save the upgrade until we know what the chest and store hold.

The Mechanical Arm and Buster Sword do indeed serve to 2HKO the Marshmallow with a T2 Autoroll. The chest contains a Healing Crystal, as seen in the Thief's episode -- not very useful, given how amazing the Forcefield is, which already takes up two equipment slots on defensive measures. Neither seemed worth a screenshot; let's move on to the Yeti.


Here's the upgraded Yeti shooting himself in the big foot. This is probably the last such mischief we will pull off on this run.


This shop offers an interesting weapon. The Short Circuit is locked at the start of any given turn; once you've rolled at least four dice of any value (no need to invest them), it becomes a "sword" that inflicts a random status effect, which can include wonderful effects like Freeze or Lock. This might prove a lifeline on Floor 5. The weapon as such is rather unreliable, but the upgraded version skips the unlocking requirement. I decide to buy, upgrade, and equip this; the Plasma Blaster is retired.


Floor 4. The Kraken is indeed back for this round. He'll probably roll over and die immediately due to the SSLP effect (also because the Forcefield stops his clock rather efficiently). I wouldn't mind, because neither of these other two enemies visible are particularly pleasant to face. The Copycat fights you with your own equipment and three dice, which can be rather damn deadly in the Elimination Round, since it will upgrade all of it. It's more advisable to rotate in a different set of equipment against this enemy than before any other encounter. In my case, though, I'm confident that I can win a damage race simply because I can get more dice than him to power the Forcefield and Mechanical Arm, and the Buster Sword doesn't give him an effective extra die. I should note that the Buster Sword doesn't always do that for us, either, since unused 5 and 6 drawn before an error add nothing -- which means that the Buster Sword benefits from wielding additional "swords", and other such outlets for high-value dice, since it doesn't compete for them.

Besides, the upgrades to the Forcefield and Mechanical Arm are very marginal. I probably should have removed the Bumpblade, though. The fight, not pictured, only lasts for two turns, since I stumble into a jackpot on Turn 1 to shave off half his health, followed by an insanely good turn for the Mechanical Arm that has it deal eight damage, followed by a 6 on the error. I'm sure we'll see a more dangerous Copycat fight at some point, though.


We won't be so lucky twice. The Dire Wolf will probably deal ~9 damage plus 2 poison per turn and Curse every ~1.3 turns (these aren't calculated; I'm eyeballing).

The first two calculations drop 5-5. I decide that losing a Shield 3 from the Forcefield won't matter that much compared to the possible benefit of 5 damage from the Buster Sword, so I Bumpblade and Short Circuit+ one of the dice (which inflicts Poison 1) and Calculate another. As Lady Luck would have it, the follow-up dice are 1-2, wherefore our start goes better than it should.


The Dire Wolf voices her dissent.


Unfazed, I attempt the same trick again immediately. Unfortunately, this 5 ends up vacuumed by a Curse trigger. I think it was the right decision, though -- losing 4 or 5 damage (plus potential Lock or Freeze) from a cursed Short Circuit would have been worse, since the Buster Sword might always just draw another reasonable high-value die to replace this "sacrifice"; if I don't error out here, that's more fuel to the Forcefield/M-Arm fire.

It turns out that Lady Luck favours the insane bold. I assume that there's no way that the Dire Wolf can survive a turn at 11HP against our current equipment, so I clicked Lucky Shot here.


I will not disarm myself.

Tune in shortly for the battle against the heinous Kraken... and possibly more?

Looks like a really cool game -- thanks for sharing!

Good to hear!

Episode 2: Robot Elimination Round (Floors 4-6)

Let's wrap this one up.


The opening roll (1-5-2 Autoroll 5) is straightforward to play; the Kraken drops to 26HP (like us). Since two dice will most often produce 7 total eyes, the Autoroll is often effective at target 13 in conjuring up either a good sword die, or 4-5 total smaller ones for the M-Arm/Forcefield. In the latter case, the Bumpblade probably still obtains one useful die for the Short Circuit -- that, or your Arm/Field will grow obscenely powerful that turn.


The Kraken begins his assault. He will inflict Blind 4 and Curse 1 every turn; the only real randomness comes from how many even dice he rolls to fuel his Overwhelm attack, whose boosts persist between rounds. The Short Circuit happened to inflict Weaken 1 here, which essentially delays him by a turn.


With effectively all my dice and CPU gauge obscured, I can still use the Bumpblade to test for sixes -- and if the tested die is not a six, the Bumpblade is the most benign target to get the Curse trigger out of the way, too. It's best to use the Forcefield next, as it will never consume a six; a 4-damage (or higher) M-Arm also exceeds the 3.5 average of a blind sword, so use that afterwards. With a CPU of 13, it should be safe to roll 3-4 dice blindly, and the Buster Sword, as usual, tends to give you one extra die here.

Edit: That's a bit of an imprecise argument, since the Mech Arm won't launch on 1/3/5, so you have to consider an average of 4, and it's superior only from 5 damage upward. Otherwise, sword superiority depends on whether the 6 roll's +2 damage is worth more to you this turn than the -2 damage on a 2.


Since Curse is never guaranteed to trigger (as mentioned, it's a coinflip on each use of equipment), you might play yourself into a corner against the insidious combination of Curse and Blind. The apparent KO on the left did not take, since the Curse trigger "waited" for the best time to strike. While the Kraken has apparently not inflicted damage, this is only because the Forcefield had been adding Shield 5 every turn. Mercifully, he doesn't start breaking through the Forcefield before he's on the brink of death.


The level 5 reward doesn't offer a new choice; most often, if you've taken the Buster Sword, you should choose the Heat Sink, and if you've taken the Ultima Weapon, you should choose the Increment, both for obvious reasons. The Heat Sink isn't that good... until it's upgraded, where the CPU decrease becomes a flat 7, no matter the (even) input. Fingers crossed.

The treasure chest behind the Kraken contained a Chocolate Cookie, as seen before in Madison's boss battle; it conveys a Fury effect. It's not categorically awful at all, but our current configuration doesn't play well with expensive countdowns (invest 12 to deal another 6, yeah right).


Floor 5. This Wisp right ahead is a rare enemy, and I believe it can only appear in the Elimination Round and Hard Mode. The same might well apply to the Warlock (on the far right). We've seen the Rhino Beetle before; the Skeleton has a two-handed sword (exactly what you expect) and a Curse attack for low-value die, rolling three per turn. Once again, all of these enemies are a cause for concern, although I think they are more benign overall than the Thief's Floor 5 enemies (well, if those had been upgraded).

The Vanish status eviscerates any die that has the same value as one you already have in hand. The Robot resists this status more than anyone due to how he draws his dice one-by-one, but it still forces his hand to invest dice early. In fact, the Robot's first character-specific episode essentially just afflicts him with permanent Vanish and expects you to adjust your play. I don't think any other enemy can inflict Vanish, by the way.


The Heat Sink's effect seems to start strong, but a 3-3 remains in the Robot's hand unused, which is a dire sign. I had erroneously replaced the Short Circuit rather than the Bumpblade under the assumption that I would not want to give up parity control, but it's apparent that the Wisp is not taking enough damage for a 3HKO here.

Distracted by concerns about my damage output before I notice how surprisingly dangerous double swords can still be, I mismanage this battle by committing neither to a defensive nor offensive approach, and end up at 22HP (restored to 30HP by an apple), probably a good 8-10 damage more than necessary. The treasure chest contains a Cheat Code, which allows you to use two jackpot effects this turn for the price of an odd die. I'm not keen on it.


The Rhino Beetle behaves much the same as before, except that his Beetle Headbutt now inflicts 8 damage. The Battle Axe is unchanged (deals 2x the value, but only accepts 4 or less). That doesn't mean he's harmless. Once again, our T1 damage output turns out to be dangerously low.


This doesn't help. At least the Heat Sink is doing its job, but at this point I realize that the Bumpblade, despite having performed such a good service on the last two Floors, adds nothing to the Heat Sink, which already performs parity control, and that I have dangerously stifled my offense by running both. The Short Circuit was holding the setup together as the sole early outlet for rolls like this.


It's starting to look dire. He might well fire off 12 total damage from the Battle Axe and 8 from the Beetle Headbutt over his next two turns, at which point we will most likely not have enough health left to defeat the Warlock afterwards. After the Autoroll, I choose One More Roll as the jackpot effect and luck out (if favourably) -- it had to be an 1, 3, 5 or 6 for obvious reasons.


It was the best of luck, it was the worst of luck. The Forcefield can hardly be overrated.


There's no way around the Warlock and nothing else to do, so we might as well try to defeat him and see what happens afterwards. I'm not hopeful at this point; barring remarkable luck / matchup / equipment, none of which we should expect to have, the Floor 6 boss cannot be beaten from ~10HP, and the Warlock has dual swords that inflict status effects which will surely not leave us wholly unscathed. The Floor 5 shops commonly sell a single apple, though, which would keep us in the game here.

In hindsight, I could have chosen my equipment more considerately for the Warlock fight, though, and this might not have been a good time to "correct" my mistake. The Bumpblade may in fact have been preferable here; you'll see in a moment.


Off to a good start, at least. The Warlock is another one of these monsters whose threat level is subject to wild variance; he's a complete pushover at times, but it depends entirely on how well-equipped you are to deal with the Confuse status. If you aren't...


Instead of blinding your dice, the Confuse status obscures your weapons. The best defense is to have a load-out where no two weapons share the same input restriction and size, of course.

This is where the Bumpblade would have come in useful, as the Heat Sink and Mechanical Arm have completely different tactical applications, but look exactly the same to me now. The same goes for the Buster Sword and Short Circuit, and while I do at least have a 50% chance to ID them for the turn (by randomly hitting the Circuit and seeing the status effect it inflicts), this effectively wastes the Buster Sword half the time. Given how essential it has been to our success, subtly and not so subtly, this is a dangerous penalty to face.

The Stage 2 random status effect from his "secondary" weapon is no joke, either. There's a good chance of Lock 2, Burn 2 or even repeated Poison 2 costing me the game here.

This may look deceptively close to a quick victory, but I've been lucky to hit the correct equipment through Confuse on T2, and Shield 6 is more fragile than I'd like at this stage.


The results of his T2. Shock 2 is not good news. This is one of the cases where I'd have been thankful to see Freeze for once, which would mitigate randomly investing into the Mech Arm early instead of the Heat Sink, but no such luck.


T3. I draw 5-6 with the Warlock at 15HP, and I don't know what has been Shocked there, but it doesn't matter, since launching a 6 with a Sword here will not suffice to KO him, and at 7 HP, we are certainly in the average kill range for dual swords; even the Forcefield may not be able to save us (5-6-x or better wins, or 4-4-x or better if the random effect for this round turns out to be Poison). Instead, I choose to try tossing the 6 into what I hope is the Heat Sink. It turns out to be the Mechanical Arm hitting him for 3, as pictured.

In this desperate situation, I decide that meekly investing the 5 into the Forcefield to live for another turn (probably...) will not save me because nearly any status effect from the Dark Shadow will prevent me from cleaning up his remaining 12HP within the one turn I will have left after this one. There's only one way to win this.


Which is to spin the wheel, and land squarely on the super rad skull field. Jackpot.

I clicked Regenerate for the bonus, because I refuse to die to x-6-6 or a puny Poison after such a stupidly heroic ass-pull (and we need to win against the Skeleton or final boss after this, anyhow, or it won't matter whether the Warlock loses). As the worn-out phrase goes -- the only point of health that matters is the last one. G'won.

Edit: To be clear, I still invested the 5 into the Forcefield here, after all -- but the idea was to hope for 1 or 2; in the former case, I would have launched the 5 with the Sword/Circuit and invested the 1 into the Field. I also gambled all-or-nothing for a single point of Shield here.


Believe it or not -- that locked die was a six. It wouldn't have mattered (yet), but it seemed pertinent.


The agony. This was the Buster Sword. Victory can still elude us if the remaining dice come up as 6, 3-3, 3-1-(not 1), or 1-1-1-1-(not 1); otherwise, the Mech Arm will end this.

Please don't roll a six.

Edit: Do you realize the mistake here?







!!!


The Dark Shadow picks Blind, which is nearly benign at this point; the battle is won, but at 3HP left. The run is over unless that shop is selling an apple.


What are the odds. Probably favourable, to be honest -- if Floor 5 has less than three visible apples, I find that it's a safe bet to assume that a store will carry one.

Nearly as an afterthought, I buy the Counterspell due to brand recognition knowing that it might help with at least one possible boss fight, and there's nothing else to spend the gold on. The Heat Sink+ is the obvious choice for the equipment upgrade.


The bizarre reprise of Floor 2 continues: after a battle on the brink of death, the next one could not begin much more auspiciously.


Time is running out fast, though. The Forcefield and a Regenerate jackpot combined can still keep us safe for the next turn, but after that, it might be over.


Even the 2-1-3-5 roll comes up again, if ordered differently. The Heat Sink+ transmutes it into a rather impressive 6-dice hand that somehow draws nothing to launch the Mech Arm with; however, since the Autoroll could not have produced a 6, we would always have come up 1 damage short anyhow. 10% matters.


The Short Circuit comes up with meaningful status effects more often than not -- that's certainly an effect I have been underrating. This was the most welcome one; player-side equipment that can inflict Curse is generally rare. Of course, even without the Curse trigger, 6HP + Shield 8 cannot be pierced in a single turn by the Skeleton.


It tries its damnedest (har, har), but the Forcefield snowballs insurmountably in yet another battle, and we reach XP level 6, which bestows +2 CPU on the Robot as his final upgrade.

If you're thinking that this reward seems marginal, and it would have been optimal to skip exactly enough XP to reach level 5 right after the Warlock fight, no earlier and no later -- I would agree. I need to improve my XP route planning.


The Floor 6 boss is selected at random, and not specific to the episode; it just happens to be the "knight" character this time. Scáthach is also a boss in this game, incidentally; her equipment resembles that of the Wizard from Floor 2.


The battle drags on since we both have strong shield equipment, but her offense is mediocre as long as you can keep her Shield down consistently yourself. The worse your offense is, the better hers will become, because "Charge!" deals damage equal to her current Shield. In fact, the "Shield Bash" strategy is one of the fundamental equipment plans for the Warrior, and possibly the most effective one.

Suffice to say that the Forcefield can keep pace with her Broadsword+ and we have sufficient weapons. I think Aoife is the only boss who doesn't try to inflict status effects on you. Lady just likes her Shield.


Lady Luck remains as elusive as ever, probably because I cut out all her story-related dialogue.

Next time: I put on my robe and wizard hat.

Episode 3: Witch Bonus Round (Floors 1-3)


The Bonus Round lets you choose your starting equipment. The Cauldron is the Witch's bread and butter, but the Daffodil is a viable pick. Like Shield, the Mana status persists between rounds; it does nothing by itself, but some of the Witch's weapons acquire additional effects by consuming your mana. The Daffodil is a rare weapon with a passive effect -- you don't need to invest any dice to get that +1 mana at the start of your turn. There's also a spell that deals three damage to the enemy as its passive effect, which makes you feel like you're playing Sneezy.


Floor 1. As is nearly always the case, going for the Floor 1 treasure chest first is the sensible move. The one exception is when the chest is guarded by an enemy that you'd rather use the Limit Break on T1. That Space Marine sports a weapon with a countdown of 20 which inflicts 10 damage (the Plasma Cannon), a notable 14HP, and 3 dice per turn; this means we'd need two Cauldron and four Snapdragon uses by T4 to avoid his second barrage. That seems very reasonable. The Frog, of course, is an enemy we know from the last episode already: Broadsword and Small Shield, 9HP, 2 dice per turn.


The Witch's interface. One of your spells is "pre-loaded" (prepared) without the need for investing a die -- at the start of the run, this will be the spell in the 1-slot, i.e. Cauldron. You can choose to any other equipped spell at any time outside combat from her Equipment (Spellbook) menu, though. Unlike the other characters, the Witch doesn't have a backpack; if she wants to learn a new spell with a full spellbook, she must forget one of the old ones.

This dice roll is auspicious. If we use the 1-2 to prepare a Snapdragon and another Cauldron from the Spellbook into the empty slots 2 and 3, we can deal 4 damage on T1 by investing the second 1 first into the Cauldron, then the new die from the Cauldron into the Snapdragon. With a second prepared Cauldron, T2 will yield an assured 5 damage. Of course, the Frog might shield up in between our turns, but the chance of rolling another 2 with three base dice and two Cauldrons is 59.8% -- and that's not counting our possible Limit Break obtained from the Frog's Broadsword. The Witch's Limit Break is the Crystal Ball, which rolls three more dice, ramping up our chance of rolling a 2 on T2 to 76.7% if we fire it.


As Lady Luck would have it, the Cauldron returns a 2 immediately. Preparing Snapdragons with both of the 2s is the clear choice here. While preparing another Cauldron in slot 3 would assure at least 8 damage on T2, the Frog's Small Shield countermeasure makes it the superior choice to invest the 1 into a Snapdragon launch instead.

A 6-4 roll denies him the chance to accrue shields, and the Snapdragons finish him on T2.


The Magic Shield is great for the first few Floors, and decent afterwards. Despite the Spellbook still having open slots, we could choose to replace the Cauldron or Snapdragon if we thought it particularly advantageous to have this spell in the 1 or 2 slots. The spell slots are not all equally valuable: for instance, whatever we put into the 6 slot should probably not be a mana-consuming spell, since our source of mana is investing 6s into the Snapdragon; in fact, the 6 slot should certainly hold our least important spell. Likewise, having a Cauldron or similar dice-fixing spell at 1 is useful to have a recourse against Freeze status. It's also good practice to have the spell slot value not match any that would be eligible for the spell itself: if you roll dice unusable with your currently-prepared spells, at least you can improve your position for the next turn. In short, this Magic Shield goes into the 4 slot.



The Space Marine fight is most notable for this bizarre turn on which I roll nothing but 4s and 1s despite the use of multiple Cauldrons and the Crystal Ball. Not that it's unwelcome. In the transition from the second to the third screenshot, you can see that spells can be replaced with prepared spells on the same turn, which is what fuels the Witch's "combo" style. Here, I chose to grab Shield 3 and then prepare another Cauldron with the 1 instead of adding Shield 6 right away, since I might still grab a 2 for preparing Snapdragon (which sure would be nice to have) and, with two prepared Magic Shields, I could probably reach Shield 9 on T2 anyway to absorb almost all of the imminent Plasma Cannon damage (10).

T2 involves more Cauldron-chaining, which has already served to deplete half his HP bar; make no mistake, that 1 damage is relevant, even on the deep floors, just because the Cauldron rarely has an opportunity cost over other equipment when already prepared, and preparing 2-3 Cauldrons early is rarely a weak move.

There's a whole array of Cauldron weapons (you might remember the Glass Cauldron which we declined to trade for in the Thief's episode) -- for instance, the Bronze Cauldron fetches you a random even die in return, which is not only powerful with equipment such as the Magic Missile+ (8 dmg from any even die), but also allows you to place your most valuable spells on even slots.


The Space Marine discovers the most serious weakness of high-countdown weapons -- apart from stacked Shields, that is. After two turns that were average at best, a good roll on his T3 would completely go to waste now. On our T3, the Snapdragon finally comes into play, and he can't deal with our two Magic Shields per turn; I could prolong this battle for a good while, but Dicey Dungeons, to my knowledge, never rewards you for locking down an enemy, except alongside a damage clock (this is different from FTL, for example, where an encounter that cannot penetrate your defenses can be used to train your crew's skills to their maximal levels, while deliberately withholding fire; this is miserable to supervise, and also optimal play). I consider that good design, unless the game has a speed-up button or another way to abstrahize the busywork.

In the early game, the Witch almost certainly has the edge over other characters with her four equipment slots per turn that she'll probably fill up by T2, but in the late game, four slots will feel constricted by comparison. On the other hand, most of the Witch's viable late-game equipment is individually powerful, and of course, the rapid rotation from the Spellbook combined with dice-fixing or dice-duplicating spells still leads to essentially more equipment slots over any given turn; it's just that you need to be careful not rotating out a utility spell too early -- or rotating it in unnecessarily. Generalities do not entertain, though; we'll probably see examples of this later on.

There's another detail to the Witch's equipment advantage; you might be wondering how the Witch obtains upgraded spells. It turns out that she does not upgrade her spells as such, but equipment slots -- if I upgrade the bottom-right equipment slot, I can place any spell from the spellbook there and it will become its upgraded version. Needless to say, this makes the Witch even more complicated -- and fun -- to play. You can view the upgraded version of any spell in advance from the Spellbook screen outside of battle.


XP level 2 gives us this choice. The Sun Beam averages 5 damage from any even die, obviously. That it also averages 0 damage from any odd die isn't such a weakness considering that 1 means preparing more Cauldrons, also to increase our chances of even dice, and 3 means more Sun Beams to spend the even dice on. It's likely that we can fill the 5 hole with a useful spell soon, too (at present, we place 5s into the Magic Shield, if not the Cauldron). In conclusion, I'll take it over the 3.5 average "sword" spell see below, particularly as Shock isn't the most relevant status effect (a few enemies, such as the Rhino Beetle, do dislike it -- for enemies to be vulnerable to Shock, they need to have both a low dice-per-turn and equipment count).

Edit: only now do I notice that the Electric Shock also only accepts even dice. This should tell you all about that spell (with Shock usually irrelevant, it's strictly worse than the Sun Beam since it averages 4 on even dice).

While we don't have a good source of mana yet, that double damage effect is very powerful as well. The Snapdragon+ would spit out mana from investing any even die, but that unfortunately competes with the Beam. The Sun Beam is fine without it, though, and we might just find a good mana generator down the road. The Daffodil may have been the better initial pick, but I'm not sure if the Sun Beam is guaranteed to be a lvl2 reward.

To the downstairs we go. Since we're playing the Bonus Round, this has a new effect.


Every time we go downstairs (except on Floor 5), a new game rule is added at random, each of which is named and themed after an enemy from this game. In our case, that would be the Slime rule; we can opt to take one mulligan, which is guaranteed not to bring up the same rule again. You get used to gauging how bad any given Floor Rule is; I find the Slime rule rather unpleasant since Poison undermines our Shield strategy, Poison is quite a common strategy on enemies that is certainly strengthened by starting our counter at 2, and even if we don't encounter many of the Poison users, taking a near-unavoidable 3 damage in every battle will add up. Re-roll, please.


The Rose rule can be nasty (indeed, I've mentioned it during the Sneezy battle last episode; taking 16 damage per turn on Floor 2 is less than amenable), but a 2-damage Cauldron is no less so. As mentioned, the Witch can generally use more equipment per turn than any other class (unless you have a Reusable weapon like the Dagger -- can you imagine the Dagger+ with this rule?); I suppose we stand to benefit more than most enemies. Not that I could change it now, anyway.


Floor 2. We fight the Wizard first here, of course, since he's hogging all the apples.


The T1 roll is amusingly dreadful. I Cauldron one of the 5s and it returns as 6, which doesn't help any more. Left with nothing else to do, I use the Witch's last remaining class ability: Throw Dice, which isn't just funny flavour-wise, but helps mitigate the worst of luck -- or mistakes. With the Rose rule active, it does indeed deal 2 damage per throw. There's an achievement for throwing 12 dice on a single turn, incidentally. The Witch is quite good at obtaining extra dice, especially from her Hall of Mirrors+ spell. She holds my record for most dice in hand simultaneously.

On his T1, the Wizard rolls a six and casts Hall of Mirrors, obtaining an extra die per turn.


The T2 roll is much improved. I decide to Cauldron the 1 rather than the 4, since a prepared Magic Shield would help against half his equipment and we might grab a 4 or 6 from it to enable that; 5 would be tossed anyhow, and 1 or 3 can invest 4 into the Sun Beam instead. The Cauldron returns 4.

He rolls 6-3, meaning another Hall of Mirrors and Poison 4. Without the Rose rule, the clock would certainly be ticking, but...


...with a Snapdragon added to our slots, he's in KO range on T3. I consider the Witch healthy enough that the apples aren't necessary and click on that treasure chest in front of the shop.


Did you expect this? If so, you'll probably have noticed that there was one less enemy on Floor 2 than usual. Of course, in the actual game, just mousing over a Mimic chest will reveal its true nature, so make a habit of scouting whenever you enter a new Floor. The Mimic also tends to show up on blots that you wouldn't expect a treasure chest to occupy (this one was particularly absurd), but I've been tripped up once or twice by his cousin, the Rotten Apple, when not exercising due diligence.

Cauldron 5 returns 1 to prepare another Cauldron, and Sun Beaming the 6 leaves the Mimic at 20HP. The Mimic's equipment is invisible to you until it's his turn (it shows up as a "Mystery Box" with the description "Very mysterious"), but it's always just one piece. This time, it's Electric Shock (seen earlier as the other choice of Level 2 equipment reward) invested with a 6, inflicting Shock 1 and readying the Limit Break.


Spot the KO: Prepare Cauldron overriding the Shocked Cauldron (yeah, the Witch can do that), prepare Sun Beam in slot 4, Cauldron twice (4 dmg), Sun Beam twice (12 dmg), and toss whatever dice came back from the Cauldron (4 dmg). In the name of the Rose!


The XP level 3 reward. This is usually an interesting choice, and depends on your equipment. The Magic Missile+ wins episodes, for instance, but other than the Cauldron+ (which becomes 2-use), I don't think our spells benefit too much from being upgraded, and decide to take the second prepared slot. We can now start out with two Rose-boosted Cauldrons per battle.


Or the shop could immediately vindicate my decision. The Moonlight Spear asks for doubles to be prepared from the spellbook, but if you place it in a prepared slot from the start, all it asks from you is a reliable method to roll 6s for very impressive damage. It competes with the Sun Beam, unfortunately, but the potential of winning battles just by spamming Cauldrons to feed this, and perhaps having a Magic Shield around, makes me buy this right away regardless.

Pictured: a bad mistake; it should have gone into slot 6, since I should have anticipated that, in practice, I'm never going to spend two dice on preparing any spell with such a specific investment requirement when "chip" damage can still be dealt by the Sun Beam if speed is of the essence. Instead, it occupies the important 5 slot now, which will backfire twice on this floor alone. The first instance thereof is that I want to buy that Nudge spell as well -- the Witch loves dice manipulation -- and 5 would have been a perfect fit for that.


T1 against the Pirate goes by without rolling any 6, which is slightly unfavourable to us at essentially four dice plus the chance to roll 1 for Cauldron and then 6. The Moonlight Spear averages about 6 expected damage per turn right now, but a roll with unusually many 6s cannot make up for a "starved" turn unless it also happens to roll the doubles to prepare a second Spear. This is another reason to put the damn Spear on 6 instead, and I'm annoyed at myself for my "automatic" choice from the last screenshot.

However, as we accrue more and more dice-fixing equipment, this will change. If you can all but guarantee a six per turn while having a solid toolkit for any other value, the Spear is unquestionably brutal.


For his part, the Pirate swings for 6 total (3/4 of the Limit gauge) and sets one of our dice on fire. If you throw a burning die, it deals 1 extra damage, and its total damage becomes Fire-elemental as well. Clicking Throw always tosses your leftmost die, by the way.


We should thank him for the assist, as touching the burning 2 for 3HP (the Rose rule also boosts Burn damage!) readies the Limit Break (I've mentioned before that the most common result of Burn 1-2 is just completing your Limit gauge more often, but stacked Burns are more concerning), which serves up the 6 needed for the Moonlight Spear. The Cauldron and Snapdragons finish him off right afterwards. The treasure chest contains a Hall of Mirrors, which is normally a good spell, but competes with half our load-out since it consumes 6s (even dice when upgraded) and would need to go into the 6 slot if not replacing anything. I don't even bother taking it, and buy Nudge from the shop instead, overwriting the Snapdragon, which is starting not to be worth its preparation cost anymore. It would have fit better into spellbook slot 3, but I'd like to keep the Sun Beam around. Technically the best fit is 1, but replacing the Cauldron would be madness with a Spear strategy.

Downstairs!


As miserable as it sounds. Re-roll without question. Note that the floor rules stack and remain active all the way up to and including the Floor 6 boss fight, so the Rose rule isn't leaving us.


Rien ne va plus. The Hothead rule is concerning as well, since this obviously screws with the Moonlight Spear and the Rose rule only makes this sting more every time; but more Limit Breaks also help the Spear, and more enemies care about high-value dice than not, such that this effect isn't a strict disadvantage.


Floor 3 introduces another new enemy to this LP. The Baby Squid is an earlier version of the Kraken, appearing on Floors 2-3. It's moderately dangerous with high variance, since its melee weapon is a sword that only accepts even dice, but has two uses per turn; it will spend its odd dice on Blind 2 instead. It can thankfully not inflict Curse. We could go for a low-XP strategy here, but neither the Handyman nor the Yeti have me overly worried. If I had picked the Daffodil starting gear, though, or the Floor rule would have been more dangerous, I might have considered avoiding the Yeti and heading straight for the downstairs.


The Rose rule is screwing with my plan to show the Witch's tactical complications. Halfway through T2, I don't bother trying to map out possible results for 1-2 Cauldrons and instead just throw the rest of my hand at the Handyman after a Sun Beam for the two-turn KO.


This situationally offers a huge adventage, but it's usually a waste of resources, so this is a good fit for spellbook slot 6. We could lock the Yeti out of his non-upgraded Ice Age (requires double 1s), for instance.


I decide to fight the Baby Squid next, to heal back to full health and obtain a Limit Break before the Yeti. The Squid can only kill us with 6-6 on two subsequent turns while our draws also leave us unable to inflict 26 damage over 2t, which would be a tremendous fluke. The Yeti is not much more dangerous, but a lack of 6 in our opening hand might give him a chance to survive for 2-3 of his turns, which could be unpleasant. A T1 Moonlight Spear makes short work of the Squid.


Duplicate is a marvel for this load-out, and I decide to replace the Nudge spell I bought just to slide this into the best possible slot (with 1 and 3 occupied by other vital spells) -- which I shouldn't have bought, if I'd known or remembered that Duplicate was a guaranteed reward, but I hadn't; this is the strategic side of Dicey Dungeons showing itself. In another interesting twist, it suddenly turns my mistake of putting Moonbeam Spear into the 5 slot into a real asset, more so since the Hothead + Rose rules would have made it costly to prepare a double-6 spell -- so, in spite of the value of advance planning, adapting to changing circumstances in the short term is also rewarded.


The dice are immediately kind in response, but let me consult my crystal ball first (which isn't always the play; Cauldron first is better when it's likely to deliver a KO without spending the Limit Break, but in this case, I might not want to reroll a 4 to fuel Sun Beam / prepare Magic Shield with, or maybe even duplicate on something like 1-2-2 from the extra dice).




Prepare two Duplicates, then Duplicate 5, Duplicate 6, launch double Spears for 22 damage (and 6 to the Witch), then prepare Sun Beam (replacing anything) and invest the final 4 for another 6 damage; Cauldron use is not indicated this turn. This leaves the Yeti at 6HP, which means we don't need to care about Ice Age or anything -- T2 will always finish him with a triple dice toss. This is a first taste of the Witch's more absurd turns -- I just wish it had involved more Cauldron-fixing.

The two apples fully restore our health afterwards, and the shop offers...


...nothing too useful? That's my first thought, at any rate, but I notice that the Gumball Machine would fit rather neatly into slot 4, giving us a second Cauldron effect to feed the Spear with; the Magic Shield has been falling out of use, anyhow. I purchase it and move on to the floor rule lottery:


I should have saved the four-dot for this one. Yeah, no.

This can be advantageous if your best equipment demands odd investment (most weapons associated with Freeze, for instance) or small dice or such, though. Incidentally, I don't recall ever having encountered a Bounty Hunter enemy; this might be the only such rule without corresponding encounter. (Was he in the Halloween Special, perhaps?)


I normally consider this one of the most benign rules, but given what 2-damage dice tossing has been doing for us, I'll have to keep this in mind more closely.

Floor 4 and perhaps beyond to follow later.

Episode 3: Witch Bonus Round (Floors 4-6)


Floor 4. The new enemies here are called Crystalina and the Sorceress. The former is mostly remarkable for making the most irritating sounds out of all enemies in the game.


T1 against the Sorceress ends up with an amusing deluge of 6s, most of which I have to chuck at her directly.


The Rose rule is starting to come back with a vengeance from the enemy side by this point. This mediocre roll hurts us for 1/3 of our health bar when the Cauldron returns a 5.


The Hothead rule continues to fuel strong T1s by giving us more Limit Breaks than we should have, but the 3HP recoil on each Spear use is no longer negligible at these enemy HP totals.


Curse tends to screw the Witch worse than other characters since preparing a spell that gets Cursed costs two dice, she's less likely to have a relatively superfluous equipment active to try and trigger Curse with than anyone else, and Cauldron, on which her build often relies so much, won't return a die if the Curse activates. Fortunately, since Crystalina has to "peel" her weapons first (like us), she can't take much advantage of her extra turn. Incidentally, Curse also doesn't protect against burning dice to the face.


T1 against the Dire Wolf doesn't go too well; I'm concerned, because Poison 2 + max. 6 damage from claws + 4 damage from 2x Throw Dice every turn requires us to kill on our T3 at the latest. The Dire Wolf getting doubles for her Curse weapon would probably help us here, since enemies won't toss dice that they have any use for.


A coinflip to KO on T2, but it lands on the wrong parity. I spend the remaining 4 on a Gumball Machine, but she can't KO anyway. Level up.


Once again, all these choices can be good, and it can be difficult to gauge. I pick the extra die here, but should have considered that a second prepared Cauldron would have been better, as battles won't last long with Rose + Sorceress rules active and our strongest weapon tied to 6 with the Hothead rule in play. The extra die only outperforms a prepared Cauldron when you have to rotate out the latter quickly and battles last ~3t or more. It might at least help against the boss, who is difficult to beat in 2t.


The treasure chest contains this. Rose rule considered, this only pays off vis-�-vis Throw Dice if you're throwing more than 3 in a single battle, which doesn't take into account the cost of the spellbook slot. I skip it.


The final floor rule (there's none before the boss). Drake is a Floor 6 boss we haven't seen yet, who forces an endurance match more than any other of them (even Aoife), and also screws with your equipment in a rather delightfully-designed way. I hope I'll get to demonstrate that in a future episode.

As for the rule, this seems like a recipe for disaster since it makes us have to burn ourselves on the Spear even more. Re-rolling gives us the Bully rule instead, which makes enemies start with a Rock (a sword weapon that can only be used onceper battle). That's not much better (still an extra ~5 damage per battle), but at least it doesn't ask for rolling an extra six per battle on the penalty of another enemy turn. I believe all possible Floor 5 rules are drawback-less benefits to the enemy alone.

Neither is this Floor 5 layout, but fortunately that Loud Bird, witchbane incarnate, is stuck on an optional path. It also appears that I was wrong about the Wisp only appearing on Elimination Rounds, but I still think that it's excluded from most of the character-specific episodes, as well as Parallel Universe.


While the Wisp battle goes by without much issue, it still takes off 15HP -- and almost all of it from handling the Moonlight Spear's input dice. It turns out that the Spear doesn't scale against the Hothead/Rose combination anymore. I'm starting to think I should have accepted Mimic and played the guessing game since enemies can still often be identified as such by their position on the map, but then I would probably have run squarely into that Loud Bird. Or that Gargoyle positioned like a goodie.


The Shockwave isn't bad, but I can't afford both it and the apple, and it's clear what I need more. I definitely regret taking the Gumball Machine over the Magic Shield now, as most of our dice-fixing power is coming from Limit Breaks at this point, and its healing is just irrelevant under these aggro-rewarding rules. Stacking Shield doesn't mesh well with the double-Spear / Duplicate approach, either, due to the lack of equipment slots, but two cauldron effects is simply too much here.


T1 against the Singer goes about as well as I could ask for.


Her roll could hardly have been better, either, although that's not too unlikely. I'm at 14HP after this, but she also doesn't last another turn.

Two apples restore the Witch's health to 28, but I still do not feel comfortable engaging the Loud Bird, who can disable our Limit Break and spellbook, dodge one attack per turn (which is horrible for a Spear loadout), and inflicts Weaken 2 every turn as well (dito; the Spear- requires 6-6 to launch). I decide, for the first time on this LP, to skip the remaining enemies on the Floor.

The boss turns out to be Madison. That's a bad roll, since that Pocket Knife under Rose rules will be awful to face, as is her Burn-inflicting weapon.



I manage to transmute my hand into a double Spear again, and must hope that her damage will be enough that another Limit Break will be ready on T2, but no higher than 13 -- we'll need to triple-Spear her, or we'll probably die, as she can easily inflict 15+ damage per round.


The computer fortunately doesn't "adapt" to our strategy or the floor rules, since this hand is obviously enough to lock us out of the game guaranteed by pushing the Witch below 7HP (or 10, really). However, to my dismay, the computer also doesn't stumble over itself enough and invests almost this entire roll into the Cookie, gaining Fury (repeat next use of equipment) and -- more importantly -- denying the Limit Break, which means we won't have a third Spear. Game over?


On T2, I Duplicate a 6 to access a Limit Break from Burn damage, but this leaves me at 12HP, and I didn't end up with the means to get a third spear this turn, sealing our fate. I think I misplayed by paying for a 6 to launch the second Spear once it had become clear that we wouldn't get a third this turn, but it doesn't matter much: Fury Rock 4+ + any three dice eligible for her Pocket Knife already kills at 15HP under Rose rules, for instance. I would have looked very silly at 12HP if her roll had by some absurd stroke of luck been 5-5-5-5-5, if nothing else (except that she'd kill a 15HP Witch via Throw Dice after Fury Rock), and the computer can always screw up...



...but not this time. I think this is only the second time that I've lost to the boss across all my runs -- usually, if you can clear Floor 5, you'll also be more than ready for the boss; the full heal at level 6 definitely helps with that, though. In hindsight, going for the low-XP route immediately after rolling Hothead would have been prudent (and not have demanded being "psychic", since my strategy did not change fundamentally afterwards); we could have finished with a heal right before Floor 6.

Next time: I try again, of course.

I think many enemies, and the general structure of progress through the game, will be familiar by now, so I'll pick out the most interesting battles and equipment choices on future episodes.

What's Loud Bird do, exactly?

Loud Bird has 44HP, 4 dice per turn, and this equipment:

* (requires Doubles) Silence enemy. Silenced characters cannot use their class abilities (i.e. the spellbook and Throw Dice) or their Limit Break; you can invest any two dice to remove the status.

* (1 even) Dodge next attack. Dodged Cauldron won't return a die, iirc.

* (1 odd) Deals Earth-elemental damage equal to the die's value, and inflicts Weaken 2.

He's dangerous because Silence + Dodge almost certainly consumes three of your dice per turn (which the Limit Break can at least reclaim), and Weaken 2 makes it so you can't rely on your currently-equipped spells to circumvent Silence, either. Especially not with the Moonlight Spear, which is essentially unusable when Weakened, unlike some other spells. The silver lining is his relatively low damage output per turn, but since he's so good at shutting down your own, it might not matter; this also means fewer Limit Breaks, though perhaps not with the rules that were in place.

Episode 3.141592: Bonus Witch Bonus Round


Crystal Mountain (Ambience 2)
I had planned to take the Daffodil this time and try the T2 Sun Beam spam strategy, but it wasn't available (at my appropriate level of Scrub Mode, that is). Cauldron it is, then.

The treasure chest on Floor 1 holds a Blue Ocean (max 4, deals damage equal to die value, if Mana >=2: additionally heals 3 damage). I consider it weak and ceremonially place it in slot 6; it never ends up mattering. The Level 2 reward is more interesting:


Beginner's Luck (Battle Theme 1)

I won't be able to accrue two mana consistently with the Snapdragon, but this doesn't matter -- the weapon is good without that effect. Taking odd dice is preferable to taking even dice, since the increase in value compared to a sword is higher -- and because it benefits from opposing Freeze.

You also probably want effects that roll odd dice for whatever your bread-and-butter utility spell in slot 1 is. This does introduce competition for resources, but the gain in flexibility from a Cauldron is probably even higher.


The Singer rule is generally not a good idea for the Witch, especially not when the spellbook is still looking rather empty (the Snapdragon isn't end-game equipment and the Blue Ocean is awful). In fact, her second character-specific episode makes all her T1 dice roll 6, all her T2 dice 5, and so on.


Once again, the Rose rule indicates that my strategy should remain based around the Cauldron. I refused to fire the Limit Break against the Floor 1 enemies this time, in order to have it available immediately on Floor 2, which speeds up the battle considerably.


The Bronze Cauldron turns out to be even stronger than I had remembered. If you don't immediately stare in disbelief at the word "(Reusable)", then I've failed to convey both the strength of Cauldrons and of reusable weapons -- to say nothing of a reusable Cauldron. With the Rose rule, this averages to a Dagger+ that also returns your dice and feeds them to Cold Snap, or prepares further Cauldrons. I buy this, slot it into 3, and choose it as my prepared spell slot at once.

The strength of this Cauldron/Bronze Cauldron/Cold Snap engine is precisely that dice can always be shoved into a Cauldron at no risk. If it comes back odd, that's 8 damage total after the subsequent Cold Snap. If it comes back even, it's 11 damage instead; this is repeatable for as many Cauldrons and Cold Snaps as you can prepare, and even an average of two on said count will KO everything up to Floor 5 in two turns. After choosing a second Prepared Slot as the lv3 reward, I can begin every battle with Cold Snap as well, allowing me to slot one more 4 into the Bronze Cauldron instead to further increase my chance of preparing double Cauldrons on T1, after which nothing can stop me. But see for yourself.


Here's a new enemy, the Alchemist. All her potions can only be used once per battle. That last one seems... interesting, but she doesn't get to use it this time. Nor do we.


I attempt not to make an avoidable mistake for once (of course, the Hothead rule came up on the re-roll last time). The Bronze Cauldron engine would be almost as vulnerable to the resulting recoil as the Duplicate / Spear strategy.


The Snowman rule is nearly benign, which is often the case if you're keeping a Cauldron effect on slot 1. With the current spellbook, 6 is still better to have than 1 in most circumstances due to the Bronze Cauldron damage and 3/5 probably getting filtered through another Cauldron right away again; but I'm not complaining about a guaranteed Cauldron spell or Cold Snap fuel per turn, either.


25+ damage on T1 (with a Limit Break) has become the norm at this point. It's not quite enough for one-turn KOs, and as such, pointless at this stage; but going forward, this will mean 2-turn KOs against Floor 4 and even Floor 5 enemies, without a need to upgrade our equipment any further.


I find the Bounty Hunter rule more than acceptable this time. While it slightly weakens the Bronze Cauldron, the chances of preparing more Cauldrons and finding more Cold Snap fuel rise in return. In conjunction with this rule, the Snowman rule will also start eliminating 5s, which are currently "bad" rolls (in so far as Cold Snap fuel can be "bad"), in favour of 1s, which are strictly better.

Bonus Round (Boss Theme 3)

Floor 4 still cannot cope with the engine for more than 2t (not pictured: a Snowman fight in between these two). The Wicker Man is weak to Nicholas Cage, and can hurt when sporting upgraded equipment.

Edit: The greatest puzzle of all is how I managed to prepare a Silver Cauldron with the Bounty Hunter rule active. I'd have to assume that the Cauldron can still spit out sixes. That would be all the better, of course, but puzzling with how the rule is worded, and surprising that I never noticed it again.


Since we don't have a dice replicator, whereas preparing Cauldrons isn't an issue with the Snowman and Bounty Hunter rules, I take the extra die. Upgraded Cold Snap just removes the parity requirement, which is useless; upgraded Cauldron (2 uses per turn) is good, but susceptible to Weaken and Curse, which are likely to be seen on Floor 5, and the extra die has higher finishing potential (compare 4-4-3-3 against 4-4-3 with a Cauldron: only the former gets to make two extra Cold Snaps and launch them on the same turn).


You'd have to have little faith in your current spellbook to take this, but if you do and get very lucky with the mutations, you'll certainly have an anecdote to tell about this game. I could probably run this for the sheer fun of it, since half the slots in my spellbook are completely irrelevant (that Daffodil has not been used yet, and will not be used during the remainder of the run; the Silver Cauldron came up once or twice)

The Witch's first character-specific challenge replaces one of her equipment slots with a random spell each turn, which is a rather uninteresting challenge -- in practice, this just feels like getting hit with Shock 1 a lot and the occasional amusing or "utilitarian" freebie.


You can certainly lose a run to this rule, but there's a good chance that we're not seeing Curse for the rest of the game, either. I'll take it.


It feels as though I've seen more Wisps over the course of this LP than the entire time I've played this game before. The Floor 5 layout is peculiar, too, with almost no branches. The Cowboy has a utility that draws him sixes and a reusable weapon that consumes sixes to deal 6 damage; his output is remarkable, but he also can't interfere with your strategy at all.


I've never seen this weapon before, but I like the sound of it (Blizzard has been part of my winning kit before, but doesn't fit with the current engine or the Bounty Hunter / Snowman rules). Even if it's made worse by not having 6s available due to the Bounty Hunter rule, this will still deal 50 damage over 3t against the boss by consuming (i.e. erasing from the spellbook, but not any active equipment slots) our Bronze Cauldron, Cold Snap and itself in any order, as long as we can obtain the appropriate dice -- two of which are provided by the Bronze Cauldron.


Floor 5 enemies are still dying in two turns. I'm at full health after the Singer falls and could go downstairs, but I'd like to have the Harvest Scythe prepared, which would be the final XP reward. This means killing a Loud Bird, but with a toolkit that has avoided even taking net damage on this floor so far, and far more benign game rules, I'm not nearly as concerned by this as last time.


Weakened Cauldrons have no effect at all (!), but our main weapon isn't all that hampered, as long as the Bronze Cauldron isn't getting downgraded along with it. The Bird gets unlucky with his two 1-rolls for Echo Blast, too.

He still manages to cut our damage in half, effectively, but seeing as that's 12HP per turn, he doesn't last more than 3t himself. I remain convinced that the previous Witch kit would have fared much worse, though; a Weakened Moonlight Spear is unusable with Hothead + Rose (taking 6 to deal 11 is clearly unsustainable, never mind having to spend an attack against his Dodge status beforehand) and Silence more harmful without a wealth of Cauldrons.


Elimination Round (Boss Theme 1)

Dicey Dungeons has mild 7th Saga Syndrome in that some of the tracks on its soundtrack are named contrary to their actual usage. This is also one of the less over-dramatic boss themes I've heard in recent memory, and I like that (all three of them are good).


Time to win this. Scáthach resembles the Wizard, but with even stronger spells, and she's immune to Lock and Freeze -- you have to beat her "fairly". Unlike the Wizard, the strength of her spell is indeed proportional to the value she rolls. At least she doesn't get Hall of Mirrors.


Shock 1 might be weak, but Shock 6 plus Silence plus 13 damage, twice in a row, is a different matter. I replaced the initial Cold Snap with a Cauldron once she was in range for the Harvest Scythe, figuring that I could certainly not break through 32HP any faster via accumulated Cold Snap and should try to maximize my odds of drawing the lethal 4 and 5 instead.


Play To Win (Theme of the Wheel)

The Witch is also Lady Luck's favourite. Perhaps a little too favoured this time -- but there's always Hard Mode. I guarantee that Witch Hard Mode lives up to its name.

I had planned to play host to the Jester's Parallel Universe next, but I think I'll slot in something else before introducing the Jester -- one of the Robot's character-specific challenges. It might also make more sense to play Parallel Universe with a character we've already seen, so perhaps I'll use a character-specific challenge with the Jester as well -- both of them are amusing, though one is probably too uncharacteristic to give a good idea of his usual gameplay (the joke is that he starts with Warrior equipment instead).

Episode 4: Jester Bonus Round, Hard Mode (Part 1)

It turned out that both of the character-specific episodes I had planned to show didn't lend themselves well to screenshot commentary, or so I felt. Moreover, I had forgotten that the Jester's challenge changes his usual Limit Break to something less interesting (and fun). Instead, I've decided to show off Hard Mode as the Jester. Without my intent, this has resulted in a flood of screenshots again, since the Jester is just that novel and, similar to the Witch, goes through many actions per turn; his "precognition" of his impending draws makes him more tactical independently of his dice rolls, too. He's well-suited to being the unlockable character (technically, all characters must be unlocked by completing the previous one's debut episode, except for the Warrior; but the Jester will always be the last one you unlock).


The Ice Stage

I believe I've mentioned this earlier, but to be sure: Hard Mode is limited to the Bonus Round; if you pick the starting gear marked Hard Mode (which isn't possible until you've beaten the regular Bonus Round at least once), you get the additional Lady Luck rule from the start, which upgrades all enemies' equipment, as in the Elimination Round.

The game keeps quiet on another change it makes, which is that you're probably going to find different equipment from what you're used to.


Our deck at the beginning. As advertised, these cards are a bit different from his usual starting gear, but not as dissimilar as a Cauldron-less Witch would be. "Snap" means his Limit Break, which we'll see in a minute. These cards are alright, but Sour Candy is certainly inferior to its ordinary counterpart, Sweets, which converts the excess to Shield instead. The Jester lacks Shield-increasing options generally, which is his one of his biggest weaknesses, but as with last episode's Witch, Shield may or may not be essential to a run depending on how much damage you can string together. What's the over/under on rolling the Rose rule again, anyhow? It even decides to show up as an enemy for the first time today.


Swing Me Another Six (Battle Theme 3)

A used piece of equipment is immediately replaced by current the top card from the deck. The Jester can also discard identically-named pieces of equipment at any time. His Limit Break turns said "discard" into "activate with magically-materializing dice of optimal value", which, needless to say, is his victory condition. He can get good turns without it once you've accrued enough cards that provide extra dice, or a good theme going around the status effect of your choice (the Jester can pull off Burn and Poison themes, among others), but Snap will always remain the unique fuel for his particular brand of insanity. Which is mighty enjoyable!

The deck refills itself whenever you end your turn; unlike the Witch, the Jester really doesn't need to think positionally across turns, but seeing his next draws makes up for that. Milling yourself to zero cards gives you access to the Finale card (if you have one; Hard Mode starts with Laugh Track, as seen in the last screenshot), which you cannot draw normally.

The best way to proceed here is to go for Blammo, discard two Kapow, invest in another Blammo and hope for the third to be the current fourth card from the top, adding up to 9 damage. If it isn't, the Sour Candy will make it 8 damage instead. It might be better to keep the Candy around for T2 healing, but I think that the Jester's weapons are individually so low on damage that the extra point of damage matters at this stage; besides, you definitely don't want to use more equipment against the Rose than necessary after T1:


Thorns X is a status that inflicts X damage on your enemy every time they attack. The Jester and Witch in particular have to play carefully against that. Beware the Cactus.


Replacing the dice you invested is an extremely powerful effect for the Jester, more so than the Witch -- this is free equipment, with the main cost being that this obstructs Snap/Discard if you only roll high values. Obviously, the Jester appreciates getting the chance to reroll a low-value die for free, so this goes into the deck. That "Ignore" option will often have its merit, though.

The Rose gave us a Limit Break as it generally will; the Wolf Puppy has an 8-countdown that awards Fury and a "Magic Missile" that deals 4 damage, as well as 3 dice -- so it can certainly inflict 8 damage per round consistently. Let's "cheat" around that, shall we?


Snap! If you have four of a card, it's usually best not to snap three of them at the same time, of course, unless you know what's coming up afterwards due to deck depletion. The Wolf Puppy doesn't have enough HP to allow me to show off the Finale card in action, but you can at least see it manifest in the otherwise-empty deck here.


The level 2 reward. Jinx effects translate to delayed execution, or time counters. I haven't seen these cards before and don't know what Slapsies does when I make the choice (you can see its effect on the right), but I remember having been pleasantly surprised by a piece of equipment called the Telephone, which is a sword (not accepting sixes) that deals its damage again on the enemy's second turn after you've used it. Said effect used the Jinx mechanics.

Jinx ticks down whenever the enemy turn begins, so Jinx 1 still activates before the enemy gets to move. Slapsies 1 inflicts 2 damage (3 thanks to the Rose).

This does turn the Gumball Machine into a slightly less desirable inclusion, but it still accepts and re-rolls 1 and 3, neither of which can be inserted into Hijinx, so I don't feel inclined to destroy that card if I get the chance.


While Snap doesn't care about this rule, I'm still not fond of the prospect of rolling e.g. 1-1-1 with Slapsies and Blammo in the deck (Slapsies 1 is alright, but such a missed opportunity due to the multiplier), apart from Hijinx demanding an even die as investment. Re-roll.


Speaker for Thorns. O Rose, thou art sick.


The Jester can spend a long time whenever he finds an opportunity to upgrade his equipment, since he carries so much of it, but this seems like the best one. I think it's guaranteed that you'll find equipment associated with the themes that are available as level 2 rewards, too.


Floor 2. If I can beat the Marshmallow without taking much damage, I should probably fight the Squid afterwards and save both apples for after the Alchemist; but if I have to consume one apple, I should defeat the Alchemist before the Squid, since, with a Limit Break obtained from the Alchemist, the Squid has an 8/9 chance of not inflicting net damage (it needs 4-4, 4-6, 6-4, or 6-6 to deal more damage than an apple will heal; I assume that it can always be defeated before its second turn if I can activate Snap immediately).


With a 1-2-6 hand, triple Blammo (12 damage) isn't possible due to Blammo's restriction of requiring 3 upwards, so I seek out the next-best option in my deck: Snapsies 2-1 followed by Hijinx (11 damage). Discard is powerful.

Edit: It would have been better to launch a Blammo with the 6, though, since a T1 KO isn't possible anyway, so there's no advantage to the Hijinx here (frankly, I had misremembered when the Telephone applies its effect). With Snapsies 3 or 4, the above would have been the play.


Play To Win
A fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. We'll rejoin him next time, on Dicey Dungeons.

Episode 4: Jester Bonus Round, Hard Mode (Part 2)

The Marshmallow's damage, as so often, sets off the Limit Break, which means curtains. At 23HP, I engage the Baby Squid without issue and level up.


The Level 3 reward, and other Floor 2 loot. Duplicate is good, but only being usable on 50% of dice values (most of which don't work with Slapsies, either) makes it more obstructive to Snap cascades than the pure cantrip Bump -- for now.

And sure, I'll take the obvious top-down synergy card for 3g, Yolanda. Destroying your own cards is sometimes indicated to remove obsolete singletons and there's an argument for double-removing Sour Candy here instead, but going completely without healing equipment seems worse than having one decent and two subpar cards to that effect. Removing just one Candy is counterproductive -- the more dice tools you amass, the less likely are you getting stuck with a non-singleton card during a Snap cascade.

I tend to accept the Vacuum floor rule, since upgraded enemies are already balanced around this rule during the Elimination Round. If my offense is barely keeping up, I might re-roll it.


Snap!

Launching Kapow with Fury does increase the use counter in between the first and second hit.


To translate his equipment, the Keymaster will deal 4 more damage per turn unless he rolls doubles, which make him stagnate. I consider this one of the least concerning enemies -- he does nothing to stop your strategy, and is guaranteed to start out slowly. If you don't start out with a Limit Break against him, though, you'll almost inevitably take 12 total damage from him since his first turn also won't fill up your gauge.


The Hijinx upgrade makes itself felt.


The level 4 reward. These cards don't require dice as input; you can just click them at any point to trigger their effect. The Witch bears a question mark in her name because this is her card's Parallel Universe version -- the Parallel Universe episodes change the effects of most equipment and statuses. Getting better chances to draw Hijinx seems superior to using the Hijinx effect twice when the card does come up -- it would only help with Slapsies 4, and then only if T1 KOs become possible with it. Nothing else besides Duplicate / Bump is particularly worth copying (Kapow is rather marginal unless Snapping, and in that case, you're probably cycling through enough sources of damage that an extra Kapow would mean little, too).

Since the Witch? card also replaces itself, this is essentially "draw two cards" even before the advantages of Snap / Discard kick in. This tends to be a good effect in Magic-like CCGs, and it's no different here.


Like the Thief, and unlike the Witch, the Jester tends to be constrained more by his amount of dice than their values. As a universal cantrip that sometimes does much more, and which should commonly allow for fine-tuning Jinx counters or obtaining even dice, this is an automatic inclusion.


Floor 3 had an optional Cactus encounter after the Keymaster, which I decided to engage. Especially with the Rose rule, which also boosts Thorns recoil, this is a less than comfortable fight, and I wouldn't have risked it if not for the full heal beforehand, and two apples available afterwards.

I'll say that, Lady Luck's impeccable fashion sense notwithstanding, I much prefer the game's original look. I think the soundtrack is apt, though.


As its one drawback, the Witch? card does stealthily disable the Jester's precognition ability for the turn. I trigger her effect, Bump the 6 to 6-1, and duplicate the 1 with the Lollipop. I trigger Snap, but have to wonder whether I shouldn't have preferred to keep Discard as the ability instead in pursuit of the second, as Thorns punish every snap and there's already 13 damage on the Jinx stack, but the allure of a possible immediate KO tempted me here.


The Rose-boosted Thorns recoil is so harsh that, losing a net 13HP (two recovered from a Sour Candy), I manage to refill the Limit gauge on the same turn (there's an achievement either for firing 2 or 3 Limit Breaks on the same turn, I forgot which), but I do not manage to play well without precognition; that Kapow would have won if I'd still had dice left.


Fortunately, he gets nothing better than a 2 for a Spear die on his turn. Nothing could have killed the Jester outright and the Slapsies "phone line" will inevitably finish him off afterwards (and without setting off any Thorns, which are reset at the start of the Cactus' turn), but it still leaves me in better health than I deserve.


Another great dice-manipulation spell. The Jester isn't really made for weapons such as the Whip, since it weakens all the low-dice cantrips and thus Snap, but I might have preferred it had I chosen the Burn pack at level 2.


I have to say, this is a badly-designed floor rule. All it adds is thoughtless busywork as you tally the enemy's current health total in a text editor instead, or on a legal pad, or in any other such fashion. I should keep this rule since it's completely "free", but instead I re-roll it out of sheer arrogance. Or maybe laziness.


One of the fables of Aesop goes that the frogs petition Zeus to give them a monarch. Zeus, puzzled by the request and presumably too busy chasing the nymph of the day, tosses a log into their pond, which initially frightens the frogs with the sound that it makes and its tremendous size compared to them. Soon, however, they notice that the log is completely idle and unresponsive, and start making fun of it. Their ambassador visits Zeus once again, telling him on behalf of all frogs that the ruler he selected is unworthy to rule them.

Zeus, no longer amused, throws a water-snake (hydra) into the pond, which does not heed the frogs' prayers and devours them all.

The moral is not to re-roll the Kraken rule in Dicey Dungeons. Stay tuned.

Episode 4: Jester Bonus Round, Hard Mode (Part 3)

A very brief update; the last part will arrive tomorrow.

Floor 4 starts me out next to a free card upgrade. I choose Duplicate, which removes its Min-4 value restriction -- it's probably the best card in my deck now, aside from perhaps the Witch.


I open with Bump 2, Duplicate+ 3, Slapsies 3, Snap!, snapping Blammo and Kapow, Nudge 2 and use the 1 on Lollipop; I eventually get another Slapsies 3 and draw a 2 from a Gumball Machine 1 to activate Hijinx+. OTK! (Yeah, putting the 1 into Concentration first would have been... salient.)

After the battle, I get the chance to clone a card -- I decide on the Witch, and probably should have chosen Duplicate+ instead. Or Hijinx+.


These cards are on theme, and I figure that adding a second Hijinx and Concentration (which have remained singletons up until now) will make up for the increased deck count and the dubious Mercy card (even with Hijinx, it's unlikely that the effect will fire before T3, and it's a dead card on all turns after T1). I shouldn't have done this.


A bad starting hand/roll against Crystalina. I used the 2 on Concentration and discarded Sour Candy, which allowed me to invest the 1 into Kapow, draw into Duplicate+, pair up the 4, invest 1-4 into Mercy and 4 into Slapsies (not basic Hijinx; I figured that would be pointless). The Wizard rule concerns me.


Discarding Hijinx is painful, but the upcoming Gumball Machine might give me a new lease on life this turn if I draw more manipulation on discarding those Kapows.


Green-bordered equipment is the best equipment. C'mere.


Her T2 readies the Limit Break. Only the enqueued triple Concentration (!) keeps me in good health through this. Afterwards, I still can't get lethal damage stacked to take effect on her half of T3. That doesn't reflect well on our Floor 5 chances.


Upgraded and basic versions of the same card do count as "matching" for Discard/Snap, so I go Slapsies 4, Mercy 2-4, Snap!, snapping 2x Kapow, 2x Hijinx (putting the Slapsies countdown at 1), 2x Kapow again. The Dire Wolf's roll is strong, but at least she doesn't get to Curse -- the Jester suffers brutally from that, as equipment failing to Curse won't replace itself.


A rare case of Mercy going off.


I don't like either of these cards, so I choose to destroy a Kapow -- I never manually invest in yellow/red cards anymore if I can help it.

This is the strangest shop selection I've seen in a while -- I have to assume the use of Blood Let is to ready the Limit Break earlier. Table Slam is on theme for myself, but I doubt it's worth a card slot -- getting stuck on bad equipment hands / topdecks is a greater danger than getting stuck on bad rolls by this point.


I'd usually keep this, especially as the Floor 5 rule, but Sorceress + Wizard + Rose sounds like an invitation to get killed in miserable fashion by enemies balanced around their weakness being either few dice per turn (e.g. Gargoyle), or lots of dice but little equipment. Re-roll.


Seems marginal. It's entirely possible we're not meeting another enemy that can inflict Shock, especially not on Floor 5, and the Shock-specializing boss or Scáthach's Storm spell can kill us anyhow if either wants to.

Next time: A Kraken fight that isn't a pushover for once. Among others.

Episode 5 Voting

A slight change of plans: The next episode will be the penultimate one, and I'll show the Parallel Universe challenge. If you'd like to see a certain class in that (all six are eligible), just post it. Voting closes as soon as I post the next update, hopefully some 12 hours from now.

After that, Episode 6 will feature the final battle against Lady Luck herself. There's a few gameplay twists that Dicey Dungeons has saved for just that...

Inventor

Sounds like a flawless victory for the Inventor. Good choice, as she finds more treasure chests than anyone else (though the Jester still finds more equipment overall, I think), which means we'll see more Parallel Universe equipment. She needs this influx to keep up with her great enemy, which she shares with Baudelaire: ennui.

Episode 4: Jester Bonus Round, Hard Mode (Part 4)


Once again, Floor 5 only admits one path, with the usual three mandatory enemies before the staircase (sometimes it's two, though; refer to the Witch's winning round). What's peculiar is that there's no shop or upgrade along the gauntlet, which worries me, since our deck could certainly use Destroy or Upgrade effects. On the other hand, the Jester's fate is, of course, the least likely to be decided by equipment changes on Floor 5 (incidentally, the Inventor takes the crown for most likely).

The Paper Knight is a new enemy again; she's weak to Fire, and along with the Snowman, a very good reason to invest into Fire-elemental damage weapons, such as I declined to do on Floor 2. Her only weapon is a Paper Sword+, which starts out at a flat 9 damage, but diminishes by one damage on every use; it demands an even die, so there's a 1/8 chance she won't get. Consistent damage that starts out high is far worse than the Kraken's brand of escalation, which could fall on either extreme between demanding one apple at most and ending the game. As if that weren't enough, she adds a piece of equipment that inflicts Lock 1 with an odd die, and can be used thrice per turn. Since the Jester only gets three dice per turn (even at Level 5), he suffers more than any other class and stands to lose entire turns to the effect.

The Singer, guardian of the trapdoor, also fits the description of consistent damage with prison effects. We've seen her on the Thief's Floor 5, but that's been a while; I should recapitulate. She has two Sad Verses, which deal 1-4 (or upgraded, as is the case here, 1-5) damage corresponding to the input value, and inflict Weaken 1 each -- horrible for the Jester, unless he can Discard/Snap the Weakened equipment -- and the 20-countdown High Note, inflicting 12 damage (the upgraded version adds Weaken 1, which is comparatively an afterthought). With the extra dice, she'll reach the latter much faster -- there's a good chance she'll get it on her T2 -- and especially under the Rose rule, we probably can't survive even the first such attack given the Sad Verse barrage.


The Kraken's first turn is low on offense, particularly as he will always invest into Deep Sea Howl before Overwhelm (this might change if you're in KO range for the latter). His second turn, though, inflicts 12 damage assisted by the Rose and Wizard rules. While his trying to keep the tempo down helps the Jinx strategy inherently, this is balanced out by my flailing around in blindness and spending my dice with terrible efficiency, or would be if I wasn't doing that regardless.


Half of the damage is remedied immediately by Concentration jinxes / Sour Candy, but I still have to Snap here before Overwhelm can shave off another 15 or 24 damage on his half of T3.

Unless, of course, my last blind die happens to be a 6, which it was. Bumping it to 6-1 allows me to Kapow twice with Mercy imminent on the queue for exactly 26 points of damage. A lucky break for sure, since having Snap available for the next battle right away could easily translate to preserving an additional 10HP, which probably means surviving another two Sad Verses from the Singer in turn.


My initial hand against the Paper Knight isn't good, but the Witch comes to the rescue by adding double Blammo at least. This is all the same turn; it amuses me how the 5 got Nudged to 4, Duplicated to pull off Hijinx, and the clone Bumped back to 5 to activate Mercy (which unfortunately replaced Hijinx) -- this does feel on flavour for a Jester.

On her half, the Wizard rule proves even more punishing than against the Kraken as she rolls an even and three odd dice, inflicting 10 damage with the Paper Sword and using the three odd dice to inflict Lock 3, which she can't normally do on the same turn.


Snap out of it! I wish.

Since the first use of the Paper Sword doesn't ready the Limit Break by itself, the second use is all but guaranteed as well; this contributes to the Paper Knight's consistently high threat level to characters lacking Shield equipment. Her second turn only inflicts Lock 1, but the Limit Break comes up one HP short, costing another 8HP on our side.

Mercy (still on the queue at Jinx 3 in that last image) turned out to be a complete waste of a die here.


I roll 4-6-6 with Slapsies 4, then Blammo, Lollipop and Nudge to reach that Hijinx+ in the deck. I don't invest into the basic Hijinx, of course, since a T1 kill isn't happening here. If nothing else, this highlights how little the additional Hijinx has been helping compared to another Slapsies -- investing 4-6 for 13 damage is subpar by any other character's standards, and even if the damage as such is above-average by the Jester's standards, he can't afford to spend his few dice so inefficiently. You can also see that his starting cards don't adapt well to the late game at all; the Fury effect, wonderful as it would be to Fury Slapsies 3/4, will never come into play at 22 cards in the deck.


In a stroke of luck, the first roll is low enough that the second one might not trip High Note, either. Winning before her T2 didn't seem likely, but there's a real chance now.


Weaken 2 remains brutal for the Jester, though. The only way to get rid of a Weakened Nudge is to invest the bumped 5 right back into it, since it's a singleton in my deck.

I probably shouldn't have invested into Mercy -- Hijinx+ on this turn, then double Hijinx on the next, was the only way for it to trigger -- but Slapsies refusing to show up made me grow concerned over my lack of damage output. As a result, I had no die left to invest into Slapsies when it showed up as my final card. If I'd had the Snap on T1, the double Concentration 4 would probably have kept me in the game, but there was no option to fight the Singer first.

Remarkably, if the Witch? card got hit with Weaken, it would have blanked out -- including even the activation button. It's as much of a disaster as Curse, and more than that -- it stays in this state for the rest of the battle; I've seen it happen before. I wonder if it's a glitch...? There has been one definitive bug that I've encountered while playing, which was fixed in the February update: the Alchemist, while transformed into a bear, would enter an infinite loop on her turn if she was afflicted with Shock.


One turn to live.


No dice (ha, ha). I don't remember if there was a way to set off the Hijinx with more prudent play, but if so, the +16HP would have kept me in the game (unless she rolled two fives for Sad Verse+, which isn't exactly unlikely; the Rose rule certainly fits the adage "can't live with it, can't live without it").

Preserving the Snap for this turn rather than firing it on T2's shaky hand (if a 4-card one) with the Concentrations might also have worked, but it's difficult to decide.


Slapsies 4 would have won as well, whereas Mercy never executed.

My conclusion is to avoid the Mercy pack, at least with only one Hijinx+. I think that my upgrades of Hijinx and Duplicate proved well-chosen, but I should have used the blueprint to copy Duplicate+ afterwards rather than the Witch; as good as that latter card is, dice were the bottleneck on Floor 5 and a second Witch, while replacing itself at no cost, doesn't offer the same reward as two Duplicate+ on a turn (to say nothing of Snap Duplicate+). I could also have picked up the Mercy pack before spending the copy or upgrade; perhaps upgrading a second Hijinx and copying it would have sufficed to make Mercy efficient.

Next time: We vigorously burn through our equipment in a wholly different fashion. Or, as the game calls it: enter the Inventor.

Episode 5: Inventor Parallel Universe (Floors 1-3)


As mentioned, the Inventor comes across more treasure chests during her journey than any other class -- three on Floor 1?!

She needs this to keep up with her own demands, though. After each battle, the gadget must be replaced by sacrificing a piece of equipment to Hephaistos.


A synopsis of novelties: The Slime is the Floor 1 encounter dedicated to the Poison effect -- or, since we're playing the Parallel Universe episode, the Poison? effect, which works like regular Shock in that it blocks a random piece of equipment, but instead of demanding any die as investment, it overlays a countdown equal to the Poison counters. Any residue of that countdown will be inflicted as damage at the end of the turn. The Poison counter still carries over as before, i.e. decrementing by 1 at the beginning of the Poisoned character's turn.

Overall, this is a much stronger effect than Shock, particularly since it directly outclasses Shock 1 (and multiple sources of Shock are rare for the player to have). If your strategy is focused around it, mid-game enemies will either lose a random piece of equipment by T2, or two of their dice on average.

The excellent Screwdriver is a sword that can reactivate the current gadget on a six -- in this case, Replicate. The Poison is blocking the Capacitor (countdown 5, deal 2 Electric damage and cause 1 Shock?, reusable), so I want to spend the 3 on the Scrap Club, click Replicate to gain 6-6 assuredly, spend one on the Screwdriver, Replicate to 6-6 again, use one six to unlock the Capacitor and the other to activate it. Shock's parallel effect is similar to the original Burn; instead of investing dice, activating Shocked? equipment costs 3 Electric damage.

The Focus Limit Break turns all the Inventor's remaining dice into sixes.


Boredom strikes; wave goodbye to Replicate (which was a notably strong gadget) and welcome our newest friend, the lousy Bubble Gun. It's generally prudent to care more about avoiding the destruction of your strongest equipment (at this point, this is clearly the Screwdriver) than about whatever effect the gadget produces, though sometimes -- and with foreknowledge of the gadgets that your equipment will turn into -- you can try to obtain a Fury, Replicate, or healing effect for e.g. the boss battle, or other enemies you consider remarkable.

The Inventor normally gets to choose between three of her active gadgets (selected at random), but the Parallel Universe episodes changes that rule as well. All "Scrap" equipment is guaranteed to be selected for this screen, and it's usually good to keep it around in the backpack until you have two vital pieces of equipment and little else at your disposal, while the next enemy guards a treasure chest or shop. In this case, though, I didn't want to lose either of my other weapons, especially since those treasure chests will surely contain some junk to sacrifice against the Space Marine.


Sure enough, it does. I invest this 2 into the Gemstone Staff since it could be swung for lethal damage next turn, and 6 is a below-average roll on two dice; there is no roll ineligible for the Staff that could win with a Capacitor at 3 plus a Screwdriver, either. I end up rolling 2-2, but since there's a full heal after this battle, the Marine's cannon getting a blast in won't matter anyhow.


The Gemstone Staff is a solid weapon, but not only is Freeze? a weaker effect than the original version (reduces all enemy dice by 1 for each point of Freeze), but eight eyes for six damage won't be efficient for much longer. 14 damage on any turn from using a single 6 will make any Floor 2 enemy submit within two turns.

At level two, the Inventor gets her third die. Much appreciated, although we shall soon reach the point where weapons become the bottleneck for once.


The Inventor usually starts out with the green-bordered Spanner, which skips both the laughable 1 damage and the max-5 restriction. This isn't worse for manufacturing sixes, though.


Floor 2 introduces another new concept, although it could have appeared in earlier episodes. "Super" enemies, distinguished also by their white aura, re-use monsters from earlier floors that would be out of their depth and provides them with better health, dice per turn and equipment, while keeping to their established theme. The Super RoboBot behaves like a regular RoboBot in that it hopes for dice valued 3+ to shoot fixed damage at you multiple times per round. Fighting it first is preferable here, as it provides another apple and, like the Squid but unlike the Dryad (due to Poison?'s new effect), has a high damage ceiling. What's more, after the next battle, either our current gadget or our equipment will be notably worse.


T1 could not have gone better. The Spannersword departs just as quickly as it arrived, because I'm obviously never risking the loss of the Screwdriver. The resulting gadget is still rather good; the combination effect is marginal to reactivate with three dice per turn and this equipment, but the first use will still optimize the Screwdriver's damage output. This indicates that the Baby Squid should be engaged first.


The Squid rolls four even dice across two turns, and a 6-6 on its second other turn would have killed (it was 4-2), but I didn't care enough about 1/36 odds to spend the Limit Break on avoiding them. Nonetheless, this shows its dangerously high variance; one shouldn't underestimate it on Floor 2.


The level-up reward lets me choose between a two-slot sword with a marginal secondary effect and an absurdly good utility that, if nothing else, doubles my chance of obtaining a six for the Screwdriver without Limit Breaking. This isn't a choice.


Buying upgrades is a risky proposition to the Inventor, of course: if I choose anything but the Screwdriver, it could get turned into a gadget randomly when I'm trying to save the Screwdriver. If I do choose it, though, it won't have an immediate effect, as the Screwdriver+ only shrinks to regular equipment size and my backpack is almost constantly empty.


There's also the small matter of the Doppeltwice+ being patently insane -- putting in 4 or 5 creates dice from thin air as per usual (6-2 and 6-4 respectively), and since it can be used twice per turn, the only value that it can't effectively turn into a six is 1. The Screwdriver approves, and so do I; as long as we can keep five trinkets equipped at any time, the chance of losing either the Screwdriver or the Doppeltwice+ after a battle is "only" 10%.

After the Dryad battle, the game offers me to trade in the Capacitor for a gadget that inflicts Shock 1 on-click. Fortunate timing, as it turns out:


As so often, Floor 3 looks like a breather after the previous one (which wasn't that dangerous this time, either). The Stereohead would be more concerning if we didn't have Shock equipment to exploit his elemental weakness, though. The altered version of Weaken X makes the afflicted character take X extra points of damage from each subsequent attack on the same turn; this is one of the most fun status effects to exploit yourself.


Unlike the regular version, Shock? can at least lock enemies out of the game, and the damage certainly adds up -- thanks to his elemental weakness, the Stereohead took 12 damage from Shock 2 on his T1. Of course, that 6-5 roll would have made the Stereohead deal 0 damage regardless, but process not results, etc.

Victory reveals that the shop has another upgrade to sell, as well as a Giant Spatula (flips all my dice upside down; good, but I already have sufficient manipulation with the Doppeltwice+ alone and, if anything, too few outlets for it) and the Saw Wave, which demands 7 total eyes to return 6-1 (not useful here).


Upgraded Thorns? is benign compaired to the pain that the original could inflict, and makes the Cactus decidedly mediocre.

On our side, we have a new weapon. This one's rather good, too, and -- unusually for a damage outlet -- green-bordered. I certainly needed something of this sort at this point, as the Screwdriver is the only other serious weapon I have left. The Doppeltwice can generate 4s from 1 and 2, making it much easier to get optimal damage from this. The upgraded version demands a total of eight eyes instead, so 12-16 damage, but doesn't play as well with the Doppeltwice+, so I'm not keen on that upgrade; I choose to make a Screwdriver+ instead, after all, which allows me to protect it by equipping the Hi Vis Jacket in my backpack.


Some more Parallel Universe status effects on display. Burn? is certainly more dangerous than the original -- and more interesting to play around, too. Reduce, instead of referring to damage, protects you from status effects, which is arguably even better; the Hi Vis Jacket confers it by passive effect, the first one we've seen for a non-Witch class.

Replicate is back -- generally, several different pieces of equipment will map to the same gadget after inspiration strikes. In this case, it was a Scrap Book originally.


Re-Equip allows you to re-use the next piece of equipment you use (unlike Fury, this does not activate the equipment by itself again, but it can sometimes outperform Fury, as the delay might allow you to gain an advantage from dice manipulation). That's good, but obviously not worth giving up the Screwdriver for; even losing the Doppeltwice+ wouldn't hurt as much. The Parallel Universe version might also do something different entirely...


The game is kind enough not to trash the Doppeltwice+. This is a stronger-than-average gadget.


A preview of Floor 4. That's a Super Wizard ahead. Given that distribution of chests, boredom might get dangerous in between him and the Loud Bird.

*falls out of bed*


The Super Wizard gets two dice per turn from the start, which helps him with his usual bottleneck, but we situationally happen to have a gadget active that largely steals his thunder (by making us immune to Shock, and all other side effects besides). Dodge?, as you can see, is functionally identical to Curse 1, but even that doesn't help him inflict damage.


The Saw Wave has been useless since the Calculator definitely prefers all other combinations of seven eyes over the lousy 6-1, and we've been constrained on weapons more than dice manipulation as it stands. There are no truly irrelevant status effects in the Parallel Universe round, in my opinion, although fewer of them are outright blow-outs compared to standard Freeze / Lock, too.

Befuddle is rather good, since any two dice in your hand will often be just about equivalent in value (high or low) unless your equipment has very specific demands; there is no downside to this tool if you input doubles, which the Inventor can produce via Limit Break, no less. I'd still have preferred any weapon, though, since the upcoming Loud Bird can dodge either the Screwdriver+ or the Calculator on any given turn.


Fortunately, Stardust produces the Weaken? X effect on T1, which acts like a reverse Reduce By in that every attack will deal X additional damage. Even the Mosquito Bite becomes relevant (and does heal for 3HP, too). A T3 victory is now certainly within the cards.


The Bird customarily hits us with Silence, or rather the amusingly useless alternate version that replaces our Limit Break with an "inferior" version that can't be seen otherwise. It's not even strictly worse; we can't use all these sixes anyway. I don't end up clicking this, however.


The Mosquito Bite insists that it's humbly carrying the run.

After this battle, I have to destroy Befuddle, which turns into Stardust again, and obviously consume both apples, as the level-up is imminent. I survey the store and it has a 3g weapon I want, the Polar Star, but I'm one coin short until after I've beaten the Rhino Beetle. The treasure chest, though, contains this:


Which is obviously "broken" (not quite, but not far off), and more so with the Doppeltwice+ turning any non-1 dice into a six, to say nothing of the Limit Break finally living up to expectations now (on any turn, not just the first). At this point, I'd destroy the Screwdriver before this one.


31 damage on T1? Don't mind if I do. Next turn, I can use the nigh-on guaranteed 6 for a Screwdriver+, and if Lady Luck is kind, I'll have a 4-3 on hand as well to close it out immediately, since I can put the fourth dice into the Mosquito Bite (lol). The Limit Break would seal it as well, of course.


The bloodiest cherry tap.


Our MOST VALUABLE WEAPON decides to quit while it's still on top of its game, like Udo Lattek.


I choose to copy the Screwdriver+, of course. Any gadget is great when it's used thrice per turn.


Granted, Focus doesn't help this weapon at all, but Doppeltwicing a 5 gives 6-4 and that's still a nice 8 damage if we can't get a 3 for the Calculator; Doppeltwicing a stray 2 has the same result, and I rarely double twice per turn in the first place. More damage outlets are needed. The restriction to even turns isn't felt that much, either, since T1 will want to use the Chainsaw above all else and T3, if it happens at all, won't require a lot of weapons here.


Floor 5 is oddly lopsided by any measure (that store most probably holds an apple, but even with that, the Wicker Man and Skeleton might prove very dangerous after a Kraken fight since Curse? may change your targeting to yourself at 50% odds, instead of causing equipment to fail; at a single use, this is bar none the most powerful status effect in the game -- of course, locking all dice etc. is even better for you). I engage the Wicker Man first, who is definitely the weakest enemy of the bunch.

He takes 32 damage on T1, and the one turn he gets doesn't allow him to use his Wicker Staff (12 countdown to deal 9 Fire-elemental damage and Burn 2; not that relevant, either). Afterwards, the game demands that I sacrifice the Doppeltwice+, and I obviously refuse, which makes it select the Screwdriver+ copy I had just obtained.


At least we get to find out what the funhouse mirror of Re-Equip does. I don't think I've seen it in use before.


Turns out it retains the dice rather than the equipment, which is decidedly not what I'd have preferred with this roll. At least this is an interesting hand because it's viable not to fire the Chainsaw first (though that happens to be an alternate optimal play, anyhow); go 4-3 Calculator, invest both 5s into the Doppeltwice+ for 6-4-6-4, then Focus to obtain a net additional 6-6. Not that there's anything to use that on.


The Skeleton decides to be (almost) as annoying as possible. The tactic here is, of course, to use dice-manipulating equipment first (such as the Doppeltwice+) to circumvent the brutal Curse? effect, hopefully. I don't care about his extra 6-2 (from retargeting) because he dies now (Re-Equip? the Chainsaw, use the resulting 6 on the Screwdriver+ and finish him off with the Polar Star, which has thereby paid back its investment already).


This is rather painful -- thanks to the Doppeltwice+, the Calculator has been responsible for a good 10 or 12 damage every turn. I'd still rather lose it than the Chainsaw or Screwdriver, though, and more to the point, this gadget's effect, while a bit marginal against regular enemies (though still amounting to two apples thanks to the Screwdriver's effect), is one of the best that you could ask for in the boss battle. The path to the trapdoor is cleared, too, and we will only stand to lose more (good) equipment from this point forward; even the Lighter excels against the boss since the Burn? effect can impede them delicately, but decidedly (imagine, for instance, Aoife having to forgo her shield or bash every other turn... yeah). We're also in good health, and the remaining upgrades are inessential (upgrade, level six reward) or unpredictable (shop)

All in all, the situation points to attacking Floor 6 right now.


Beatrice is a wonderful name (generally, not for the pun here).

She's the Shock specialist. Auspicious, because Shock? (disables a random gadget, can pay 3HP to unshock) is easier to play around than regular Shock stacks, our gadget gives essentially one free unshocking every turn, and it will result in Limit Breaks on demand.


The "Curse" is more concerning, since the usual countermeasure of using the Doppeltwice+ first carries a greater risk -- she won't usually fire all these Shocks on a single turn, but with an extra 6-2, she certainly will.

(The conclusion will follow in a few minutes.)

Luck is with the Inventor on her T1. The second one goes worse, though, as I fail to trigger Dodge? on the Lighter, Focus, find that the Screwdriver+ gets Dodged, and subsequently cannot use the Polar Star, either.


She dodges the Screwdriver+ again on T3 (which, incidentally, denies re-activation of the gadget as well). Her damage output is too low against our free healing, though (and would still be so without it, if barely).


Since we can grab Focus from the unshocking, this is won -- three weapons are available with the given dice, any two of them will KO, and she can only dodge one.

Next time: The final episode -- against Lady Luck herself.

Do you change equipment after the boss?

When (and only when) the Floor 6 boss reaches 0HP, you win the episode on the spot, as with the rebel flagship in FTL. The Inventor doesn't toss her gadget afterwards. Equipment doesn't carry over or influence the equipment in other episodes; no bones files here, either.