Deckbuilders have spent the last few years proving that almost anything can become the foundation for a roguelike. We’ve battled with cards, built impossible poker hands, and even turned slot machines into engines capable of producing wonderfully broken runs.
Dice in Wonderland is taking a slightly different approach.
Recently listed on Steam ahead of its planned November 2026 release, the upcoming roguelike from Feelosophy swaps traditional decks for a customisable pool of dice, challenging players to roll poker hands while gradually transforming every die into part of an increasingly elaborate scoring machine.
The concept immediately stands out because, despite borrowing familiar poker hands like pairs, straights and flushes, this isn’t simply Balatro with dice. Every roll presents another decision. Which dice do you lock in? Which ones are worth risking on another reroll? Since every reroll comes at a cost, even a seemingly straightforward hand becomes a balancing act between securing points now or gambling on something much bigger later.
That same philosophy extends well beyond individual turns. Rather than building a deck of increasingly powerful cards, you’re constantly forging your dice pool throughout a run. Individual faces can be enhanced, engravings alter how dice behave, and colors introduce entirely new interactions. Layer relics, consumables and permanent augments on top, and what starts as five ordinary dice can evolve into a surprisingly complex scoring engine capable of producing enormous multipliers.
Wonderland Doesn’t Play Fair
If the dice mechanics provide the strategy, Wonderland provides the unpredictability. Instead of simply increasing enemy health or damage as you progress, each chapter introduces new rules that force you to rethink the build you’ve been carefully putting together. The White Rabbit only gives you a single opportunity to score everything you’ve built towards, while the Red Queen refuses to count blue dice altogether. Bosses and elite encounters continue that theme by introducing gimmicks specifically designed to disrupt strategies that seemed unstoppable only moments earlier.
It’s the kind of design that feels particularly well suited to roguelikes. The best runs rarely come from following the exact same plan every time, and Dice in Wonderland appears to embrace that idea by encouraging adaptation rather than optimization.
The setting helps reinforce that unpredictability too. Instead of the colorful fantasy world most people associate with Alice in Wonderland, Feelosophy leans into a much darker Victorian interpretation, with the ever-present Cheshire Cat watching over each run while branching paths, hidden chapters and multiple difficulty levels promise plenty of reasons to keep diving further down the rabbit hole.
There’s still plenty we don’t know before the game arrives next November, and balancing will inevitably determine whether all of these systems come together as successfully as they sound on paper. Even so, the early premise already gives Dice in Wonderland an identity that’s refreshingly different from the growing crowd of card-based roguelikes currently on Steam.