Dice With Death Review
A poker dicebuilder about pushing your luck against Death, where big rolls should hit but often don’t feel as strong as they should.
Dice With Death. Credit: Sea Glass Games
Sea Glass Games’ Dice With Death opens with a great hook: a roguelite, turn-based, poker “dice builder” where you play against Death himself. It should feel tense. It too often feels limp.
You’ve already died. Before you move on, Death offers you a game to pass the time. It’s a timeless setup, somewhere between The Seventh Seal’s existential wager and Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey’s looser, more playful spin on beating Death at his own games. Here, the tone leans light. Death isn’t terrifying. He’s a little smug, a little mysterious, and mostly there to keep the rounds moving.
Each run plays out as a dice-based duel. You roll a pool of dice and try to form poker-style hands to deal damage. You can lock in a pair or a full house and reroll the rest, pushing to add extra hands for more damage. Push too far and miss a valid hand with your shrinking pool, and your turn ends with nothing. Nail a full clear and you get to roll everything again, stacking damage in a way that hits when it lines up right. High risk, high reward.
Dice With Death. Credit: Sea Glass Games
It gets more interesting as you pick up dice with special effects and relics that twist the rules. Unlockable classes push runs in different directions with new mechanics. Relics like the Envenomed Blade or Emerald Ring lean further into that, rewarding specific hands or nudging the odds in your favor, while higher-tier dice can layer in effects like poison or scaling damage that turn one good roll into a chain reaction. When a build comes together and a run stretches out, you're riding a high.
The problem is how often it doesn’t. This is still a dice game, with all the RNG that entails. That tension is part of the appeal, but here it wears thin because the decisions around it don’t go far enough. You’re usually just chasing a better version of the same turn instead of making a meaningful pivot. Runs start to blur together, even as new classes, relics, and dice unlock and technically expand your options.
The presentation drags it down further. The UI has readability issues. Dice blend together too easily, with color and thin borders doing most of the work. Relics sit against the background without enough contrast to stand out. Their designs don’t communicate what they do at a glance. Big turns don’t look or sound as strong as they should, so strong rolls pass by without much impact.
Other dice builders do more with this idea and feel better doing it. Dice With Death has a solid foundation, but the core interaction never gets strong enough to carry it, and that makes it easy to drop.
Dice With Death
A smart poker dicebuilder let down by a core loop that never gets satisfying enough to carry it.
