That enormous boss who’s just spent the last ten minutes making your life miserable? You could finish it off, collect your rewards, and move on. Or you could stuff it into a bottle, take it home, and make it fight for you instead. Suddenly, getting absolutely destroyed by a powerful enemy doesn’t seem quite so bad when you’re already planning how to recruit it.
Dicey Bugs is a turn-based creature-collecting roguelite from developer ProdigalSon Games that combines monster-catching with dice-building and tactical combat. You’ll capture bugs, assemble teams, customize your dice, and experiment with increasingly ridiculous combinations of abilities as you work your way through each run.
Gotta Catch ‘Em All, Including the Big Ones
Building your collection in Dicey Bugs involves more than defeating enemies and hoping something useful drops afterward. Every bug you encounter can potentially become part of your team, provided you can weaken it enough to capture it. That includes ordinary enemies, elite creatures, and even the bosses standing in your way.
Once a battle ends, you’ll decide what to do with your latest acquisition. You can swap it directly into your active party or send it home to join your permanent collection, where it’ll be available for future runs. That creates some entertaining decisions whenever you encounter a powerful opponent. Defeating it might be the easiest way to survive the current battle, but capturing it could give you an enormous advantage later.
Today’s annoying enemy could become tomorrow’s most valuable teammate.
The Dice Don’t Decide Everything
Combat in Dicey Bugs has an unusual trick up its sleeve. Although every creature’s actions are represented by dice, you’re the one who decides when those actions happen. Rather than watching your team and its opponents automatically take turns, you’ll choose which available die to play next, controlling the order of actions on both sides of the battlefield.
Nothing moves forward until you make a decision. That gives you an enormous amount of control over how each encounter unfolds, allowing you to plan combinations, manipulate the timing of enemy attacks, and set up abilities that work together.
Positioning matters, too. Where your bugs stand and when their dice are activated can dramatically change the outcome of a fight. A seemingly harmless ability might become devastating when activated immediately after another creature’s attack, while choosing the wrong action first could completely ruin a combination.
There’s still plenty of uncertainty to deal with, but at least when everything goes horribly wrong, you know exactly who’s responsible.
Build a Team That’s Completely Broken
Your collection of bugs is just a part of the game. Before each run, you can also customize a support die using faces you’ve unlocked through previous adventures. These additional actions give you another way to shape your strategy before the fighting even begins.
Defeating bosses rewards you with new die faces, gradually expanding the possibilities available for future builds, and once you’re inside a run, there are even more opportunities to improve your team. Winning battles provides rewards such as permanent stat increases or additional bottles for capturing creatures. You can also visit the shop whenever you like, rerolling or restocking its inventory to find upgrades that complement your current lineup.
The real fun comes from discovering which bugs work best together. Abilities can stack, trigger one another, or create combinations that become far stronger than their individual parts. Finding one powerful creature is satisfying enough. Finding two that make each other absurdly dangerous is even better.
Your Friends Can Join the Bug Battles Too
Beyond its single-player runs, Dicey Bugs also includes casual online PvP battles. These matches let you test your teams against other players without risking the creatures you’ve spent so much time collecting. You retain control over the action order on both sides, keeping the same tactical approach found in the main game.
There’s even Twitch integration that allows viewers to trigger effects that help or sabotage a run.
Dicey Bugs was released on September 12, 2025, and is available on Steam for PC, with Windows and Linux support and full Steam Deck compatibility. Its combination of monster collecting, customizable dice, and turn-based combat gives players plenty of room to experiment without relying entirely on lucky rolls.