What is the Game?

So Dice Throne is a battle game where you generally play 1 vs 1 in a dice chucking fantasy setting. It has some feel of a video game like Mortal Kombat. Your turns are spent upgrading your attacks, playing cards to heal, or manipulate your dice during attacks, and then your opponent rolling dice for their defense. It has a kind of Magic the Gathering flow with how the turns work, but this is a pure dice chucker. You can also play on teams, or with an odd number of players play King of the Hill where you attack one person and you can choose, but there is a benefit to attacking the person with the most healthy. The last character standing is the winner.

The Top 10

10 – Moon Elf

We start with a pretty easy character to play, the Moon Elf. They are one of the first ones that they recommend that you play, and they are just fun. I like that they give you a wide variety of tokens that you can use some of them help with the defensive side of things, like evasive, and others like blind and entangle are negative. I really think that the more defensive nature of the character is interesting. You really are looking to reduce damage a lot of the time when attacked versus others that are wanting to push out damage.

9 – Artificer

While the Moon Elf is a simpler character, the next two are going to be much more complex. The Artificer is all about building up three different robots and using them. or placing nanites on your enemy and then exploding them. There are a lot of moving pieces that you need to keep track of. But I like trying to figure out that puzzle, what to spend my synth on, which is what you use to build, activate and possibly use other abilities as well. The more you need to manage the more interesting it can be for me.

8 – Treant

Like I said, I like to manage a lot of things, but the Treant simplifies it a little bit from the Artificer, where it has seedlings that just grow every turn. And it also can heal a lot. But do you grow a seedling up to the largest level or do you keep them smaller and have more. There is certainly a puzzle to it as you have to decide at times between three things for how to use your seedlings. The Treant also has more ability to heal than a lot of other characters as well. They can put together a good defensive battle quite often.

7 – Ninja

Packaged with the Treant is the Ninja in the duel packs, and I have both in my Top 10. Now that’ll happen some more, but I’ve only gotten to play the Ninja with a physical copy recently. I like the abilities that the ninja has, the delayed poison adds a twist because it’s one of the few abilities that triggers at the end of a round. They aren’t the most defensive character, but a well times smoke bomb can be a big win for them. But I really like them because they can push the offense with the delayed poison and the ninjitsu.

6 – Shadow Thief

The Shadow Thief is a weird one and in a really good way. The Shadow Thief gets so much of it’s power from combat points. The combat points are normally just used to get cards into play, but the Shadow Thief generates damage based off how much CP it has and it can gain even more CP based off of attacks. It used to be able to steal a lot of CP from other players, but they have limited it now, it’s still a great time because it gives you so many options. I feel like the Shadow Thief is one of the most flexible characters.

5 – Vampire Lord

Now, some of the characters that heal, I don’t like that well. But the Vampire Lord makes it fun because they heal by draining others, as you’d expect. They have a lot of blood powers, and mesmerize which is a fun power. They also deal maybe smaller amounts of damage but there is a lot that’s undefendable which means that they can at times get more damage through consistently. Overall just a fun one to play, and I really like the ones that have powers or tokens that stack up and can do more the more that you have.

4 – Cursed Pirate

This is another one that is out there. All the characters have ways to upgrade your attack spots and defense, except for the Cursed Pirate side. The Cursed Pirate has a side and then a Ghost Pirate side that you can flip to. It has an interesting push your luck element to it as you want to become the Ghost Pirate but if you do, you start taking damage on your turn, and there is no going back. So it creates a timer, but the abilities on that side are better, so do you rush it and shoot for big hits or do you keep yourself just cursed and try and survive longer that way.

3 – Monk

The monk is probably the most defensive character on the list. They get Evasive that allows them to potentially take no damage. They have chi which will block damage, and they can cleanse negative affects off themselves. Again, that Chi gives them a resource that is interesting to use and gives them so much survivability in this game. The Monk can draw things out until you can upgrade a lot and get some big hits in of your own. Normally I don’t always love a ton of defense, but the monk is definitely interesting in how it does it.

2 – Pyromancer

So I go from a defensive character to a completely offensive character. On defensive rolls the Pyromancer can’t stop incoming damage, they can just deal damage back. And I think that it feels like a rush as you try and push out as much damage as possible and race to the end. They also give you fire mastery to mess around with. This again goes that resource management where you need to know how to spend them or when you should horde up more of them to get a bigger hit later. And while a lot of these resources that stack up add over time, the fire mastery reduces every turn so timing up the big hits is key.

1 – Gunslinger

Finally, number one, we have the Gunslinger. It is really close between the Gunslinger and the Pyromancer. The Gunslinger just feels like a jack of all trades. You can get bounty on people will will do more damage and I love the defense on the Gunslinger which is just a duel or a roll off that can greatly reduce damage. It feels so thematic, which all of the characters do, which is impressive for a dice chucking game.

Some of the characters I don’t have on the list are generally ones that I need to play more. The Huntress I think is very interesting, I just need to spend more time figuring out that character and her tiger pet which is really interesting. The Seraph and Paladin can both be more defensive as well. And the Tactician and Samurai I just haven’t played with enough. The Barbarian is fine as well, just more of a basic character, good for new players.

What is your favorite Dice Throne character?

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Dice Throne is a 2 to 6 player game where you take on the rolls of different characters or classes, in a tournament style battle ranging from one vs one to three vs three. Each class has their own life tracker, combat point tracker, deck of cards, and player boards that let you know what your special powers are. Each player starts with a hand of four cards and two combat points (CP). The first player can play cards and then rolls dice for combat. You are trying to match certain number of symbol combinations to unleash an attack. Then the other player declares their defense and tries to stop the damage. You can augment your roll by spending CP and playing cards or you can improve your attacks by spending CP and upgrading what a small straight or some other attack might do for you.

Overall, it’s an an extremely complex game, and the characters aren’t all that hard to play. What makes this game really work is the characters, because each of them plays differently. I haven’t played two of them yet, the Paladin and the Barbarian, but in a match-up between the Shadow Thief and Monk was close, and the match-up between the Pyromancer and Moon Elf was close. So the characters feel really well balanced against each other, and it comes down to rolling dice a lot of the time. What works well is that the cards you can play while rolling the dice are generally pretty cheap CP wise so you can mitigate a really bad roll fairly often.

The characters also do really feel different. The Monk uses Chi to empower attacks or to prevent damage. The Shadow Thief can go into hiding to avoid damage, steals a lot of CP, and then can leap out of the shadows with a sneak attack. The Pyromancer is going to burn you, and the Moon Elf tries to entangle you and makes your attacks weaker. Their attacks make sense for what they do, and the tokens and conditions they can place on themselves or other characters makes sense as well. In their decks of cards there are some specific to them, but I haven’t gone through to see if the balance of utility cards is the same throughout the characters or if those general cards are the same for everyone.

It’s nice also because the game plays very fast with two players, and it keeps there from being too much down time for players. Even when the other person is attacking, you are figuring out with your defense what you are going to try and roll. So you are still engaged in the other players turns. And with fifty health, you feel as a player that your health is draining away a whole lot faster than you’d want it to. When you hit you’re generally doing five damage or more, and sometimes, if you hit your ultimate ability, you can be doing a whole lot more than that.

That’s another cool thing in the game, the ultimate ability is basically an attack that can’t be stopped, so really going into the Mortal Kombat style of game. However, you need to roll all sixes, so you end up being tempted to go for it, but generally not able to pull it off. If you can pull it off, it might just give you a come from behind victory. And each characters ultimate ability really uses the tokens and conditions that the character can inflict so even if you don’t finish off your opponent, it can set you up for future turns, or stop them for a turn.

This is a very fun and simple game. I highly recommend it for both gamers and non-gamers alike, because it’s a quick one to set-up and play. The fact it plays fast means that it’s also a good filler game. If every character felt the same, that would be an issue, but they really do feel different, and there’s been a season two which has even more characters – eight instead of six – which gives you a ton more combinations to play.

Overall Grade: A-
Gamer Grade: B-
Casual Grade: A+

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