Pip My Dice is a Yahtzee roguelike inspired by Balatro, just to get the comparison out of the way. You’re building a “deck” of dice to roll, modifying them by changing the faces, or colours of the dice to skew towards a strategy to bypass the rounds score target. In fact, if you’ve played Balatro and are looking for a slightly different take, you can stop reading and grab Pip My Dice’s Demo and give a roll.
If you’re not familiar, well, in either game you’re playing a base game of sorts (Yahtzee here, poker in Balatro), but you can modify just about everything that can affect score. You can get more dice instead of the standard five six-sided ones. They can do things like increase the score or increase the multiplier or add currency. You have three slots you can put your rolls in, each scoring separately and adding to the final total. Painting dice gives effects like blue dice will change the base value, while red change the multiplier. You can change faces to add higher numbers beyond 6, or, weigh a side so the opposite comes up more often. Finally, you have relics, adding whatever modifier they have, such as a bonus base score on even numbers rolled.
When it’s all said and done, any slots used will gain a multiplier for the run. Beating the score ends the round, and if you score high enough, you get overkill bonuses and other sorts of things. Everything about the game is chasing bigger bonuses and bigger numbers. You’ll hit a small shop, allowing you to buy more dice, sometimes they’ll be blank and devoid of any numbers, sometimes they’ll be special in some way, as well as individual faces, paints, or relics as well.
Boss rounds will have special effects, like locking out a slot from use, or restricting certain numbers/combinations (like straights). All in all, the tutorial teaches this well enough I found, it leads you through a lot of the steps including upgrading your dice. The Pip My Dice dev learned well from Balatro in evoking a lot of the same feelings. I’ll say that the relics are a big downgrade from the Jokers for theming and marketing.
Pip My Dice has a Q1 2025 release date, and as I posted earlier, the demo’s out there.