Since Balatro's runaway success I've seen a horde of roguelikes trying to recapture the magic with little success. Dice A Million is the closest I've seen yet, rolling the dice more than a few times during Steam Next Fest. A switch from playing cards to dice is an elegant shift in direction that makes for a refreshing twist while remaining easy to understand – if anything, knowing how dice rolls work plays with shared human knowledge even more than scoring poker hands.
If you somehow missed the birth of this genre with the excellent Balatro, this style of roguelike is all about scoring points – and the same is true for Dice A Million, which comes from developer countlessnights. This twist on the roguelike tasks you with making your way through challenges that require you to match ever escalating points by playing a limited number of hands or rolls. Between each challenge you can enhance your 'deck', aiming to build combos that will power up scoring in often game-breaking ways. Where Balatro uses poker hands for scoring, Dice A Million is all about rolling dice with unique faces to achieve a total score. Extremely replayable because of this system, it's well worth trying for yourself, and checking out our Steam Next Fest guide for more.
Roll up, roll up
"What's exciting about dice?" I hear you ask. Aha! But there are some many different types of dice! Starting out with a pack of dice made up of d3 and d4 (which, believe it or not, have faces of 1-3 and 1-4 respectively), the heights of your early scores are limited. But, eventually, you'll be able to pack in the likes of the classic d6. d7! d10! The treasures and delights of any who have played a tabletop RPG. And who can forget dice like, erm, a literal coin? An explosive pinata? A matryoshka doll?
Yes, dice that roll only odd or only even are far from the weirdest Dice A Million gets. The deeper you go, and the rarer dice you uncover, the stranger they become. Often packing strong effects that can combo together, you eventually pare back your basic starter dice into a selection of some quirky little objects. One of my favorites is simply the Joined Die – two smaller dice taped together so they roll a combination of possibilities.
One of my best runs so far was based around a Prime Die that enhanced the other dice in a roll with prime number-based multipliers if they landed on prime numbers themselves. Then there's a vampiric die that can leech off of surrounding dice to boost its own power, and a paper die that leaves behind a buff where it was rolled for subsequent rounds. There's even a love die that will multiply itself and a nearby die – but only if there's only one other die in its area of effect. Yes, even where dice roll is a factor as well as what they roll.
Like Balatro, you're presented with a shop between rounds through which you can buy new die, score enhancing stamps, or rings – items that appear on the digits of your hand as you make a roll that provide boosts of their own. You can also spend currency before some rounds to enhance the upcoming rewards… if you pass a roll check, of course. Naturally, the final round of a board is against a harsher challenge with special effects like debuffing dice that have been played before or stopping you from even seeing which dice you have in hand.
Rolling the dice has been so delightfully moreish it's been hard to pull myself away from going again and again. So far, though, I'm curious if it'll have the staying power to truly make every run feel fresh, as I do find myself falling into some tactics that seem simple enough to pull off time and time again, and as score can carry over between some rounds it can be easy to shoot off ahead once you get some systems going. Yet, that's all still very early days. For now, it's well worth rolling the dice for yourself – you never know what they'll land on. Dice A Million releases for PC in January 2026.
