In most dice games, you can pretty much blame a bad roll is things don’t go your way. In Dicevaders however, you can change them.
Pengonauts’ dice-based roguelike deckbuilder launches today, putting humanity on the defensive while you build an alien army, fill a grid with units, and turn a handful of dice into the start of some wonderfully broken chain reactions. It’s set in the same universe as StarVaders, only this time you’re not protecting Earth.
You’re the problem and invading an entire planet involves quite a lot of math.
A Bad Roll Is More of a Suggestion
Dice sit at the center of every turn, but Dicevaders isn’t asking you to cross your fingers and hope for sixes. You draft units onto a grid, collect artifacts, and use the numbers you roll to trigger scoring combinations. Matching dice in pairs, triples, or groups of four can set off bigger combos, especially once your units and artifacts start feeding into each other.
There’s also Budges and Chrono. Budges let you nudge dice toward the numbers you actually need, while Chrono can reroll them and refresh the shop when what’s currently on offer isn’t helping. So when the dice hand you something terrible, you don’t have to just accept your fate, you can interfere.
Exactly how much interfering you can get away with depends on the build you’ve put together.
Pick Your Commander, Then Break Something
There are 10 Commanders available at launch, and each one has their own perks, artifacts, and reasons for approaching the grid differently. The Duchess, for example, builds around Chess units and can expand the board with an extra row. Whisperer spawns Apples that can be destroyed to strengthen the rest of the build. Blood Beast actively rewards you for destroying your own units, because apparently conquering Earth wasn’t aggressive enough already. Then there’s Hex Prince, who brings bees and Honey into an alien invasion.
With more than 60 units and 120 artifacts in the full game, there are plenty of pieces to throw together while looking for the combination that sends your attack score somewhere into deep space.
Earth Does Have Something to Say About This
Humanity isn’t simply waiting around for the invasion to finish. Pilots from StarVaders turn up to defend the planet, each bringing abilities designed to mess with whatever beautifully overpowered setup you’ve spent the run creating.
Beyond the main runs, Dicevaders comes with more than 30 Constellations that change the artifact pools and units available to you, six difficulty levels, and a Multiverse Campaign containing 13 extra challenges. Daily Challenges give you another reason to come back once you’ve already found a few favorite ways to ruin Earth’s day.
It’s a lot of room for experimentation, which matters when the whole game is built around seeing just how far one good idea can snowball.
Dicevaders arrives from developer Pengonauts and publisher Playstack, launching on Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 alongside PC.
There’s still a free demo available too, so anyone curious about how much control a dice game can actually give you can get an early taste of the system.
Earth is counting on you not to.