They say you should never leave your fate to a roll of the dice. That’s sensible advice when you’re surrounded by monsters, your health is running low, and your next throw could determine whether you survive another round.
What if you could replace those useless dice faces with something a little more dangerous? Throw in a few captured monsters, some powerful abilities, and a collection of relics, and suddenly the odds start looking much better. Of course, you’ll still need to roll the right numbers. Even a carefully engineered set of dice can have a spectacularly bad day.
Today’s Rogue Discovery is the addictive Circadian Dice, a dice-building roguelike developed by Shuffle Up Games and originally released on July 11, 2022. Taking inspiration from games like Slay the Spire, it replaces traditional cards with customizable dice that you can modify throughout each run. With ten playable heroes, more than 110 abilities, 60 relics, and a monster-capturing mechanic that lets you turn enemies into useful equipment, there’s plenty here for players who enjoy experimenting with unusual builds.
Six Sides, Endless Possibilities
At the center of Circadian Dice is a simple idea. Instead of collecting cards or upgrading weapons, you’re building your own dice. Each die has six faces containing different symbols, with effects ranging from dealing damage and generating gold to providing shields or activating special abilities. As you progress through encounters, you’ll have opportunities to replace individual faces, gradually changing how your dice behave.
That means you’re not just hoping to find a powerful item, you’re deciding which effects deserve a place on your dice and how they might work together. You could concentrate on building an aggressive set of dice packed with attack symbols, hoping to overwhelm enemies before they can cause too much trouble. Alternatively, you may prefer a more defensive approach, combining shields, healing, and abilities that help you survive longer encounters.
Of course, having the right symbols doesn’t guarantee they’ll appear when you need them. You’re still rolling dice, after all. The balance between controlling your build and dealing with unpredictable rolls gives Circadian Dice much of its appeal.
Why Kill a Monster When You Can Keep It?
One of the game’s more unusual mechanics involves capturing enemies and adding them to your dice. Almost every monster you encounter can be captured, with different creatures providing bonuses and attacks based on their abilities. Instead of viewing enemies solely as obstacles, you can start looking at them as potential additions to your growing collection of useful effects.
With 66 enemy types and 27 bosses, there’s a substantial collection of creatures to discover. Some enemies can also appear with rare mutations, introducing additional effects that change how encounters play out.
The capture mechanic encourages you to think about battles differently too. Defeating everything as quickly as possible might be the safest option, but sometimes there’s a good reason to keep a monster around long enough to add it to your arsenal. It’s a little like collecting creatures in a monster-catching RPG, except your new companions spend their time trapped inside six-sided dice rather than following you around the countryside.
Ten Heroes and an Awful Lot of Bad Decisions
The dice-building system provides plenty of opportunities for experimentation, but your choice of hero can change how you approach each run. Circadian Dice features ten playable heroes, each with different characteristics and abilities. Some are better suited to particular strategies, encouraging you to experiment with combinations you might otherwise overlook.
The game also includes more than 110 abilities and 60 unlockable relics, providing additional ways to influence your builds. Relics can improve your hero’s statistics, modify existing mechanics, or introduce effects that work alongside the symbols you’ve collected. Combining the right relic with a useful ability can make an already promising set of dice much more effective.
There’s plenty of room for experimentation, especially when you discover an interaction that changes how you approach combat. You could begin a scenario intending to build around straightforward damage, only to find an ability that makes a completely different strategy more appealing. Suddenly, you’re replacing dice faces, reconsidering your relic choices, and hoping your new idea doesn’t fall apart during the next encounter.
You’re constantly looking for ways to improve what you already have, while wondering whether the next upgrade could unlock something even better.
A Quick Roll Before Bed? Good Luck With That
One of Circadian Dice‘s strengths is that it doesn’t demand an enormous time commitment for every attempt. The game features 13 handcrafted scenarios, each designed to take approximately 10 to 30 minutes. Rather than embarking on a lengthy campaign every time you play, you can tackle a self-contained challenge, experiment with a build, and see how far your strategy takes you.
Each scenario offers Normal and Hard difficulty settings, with Hard Mode introducing different enemies, secrets, and challenges rather than simply increasing enemy statistics. There’s also an endless randomized scenario for players who want to keep pushing their builds, alongside a campaign mode offering a longer roguelike experience.
Although your dice and hero reset between scenarios, your unlocked abilities, relics, upgrades, and modifiers remain available for future attempts. Performing well unlocks additional options, gradually expanding the combinations you can experiment with. That creates a satisfying progression loop without requiring every session to become a marathon.
You can finish a scenario in half an hour, unlock something, and decide to try it during your next run.
Why Circadian Dice Deserves a Look
The ability to customize individual dice faces in Circadian Dice provides a level of control that traditional dice games rarely offer, while the randomness of each roll ensures that even a well-planned strategy can run into trouble.
Its monster-capturing system encourages players to consider which enemies might be useful additions to their builds. Meanwhile, the different heroes, relics, abilities, and scenarios provide plenty of reasons to experiment with new approaches. The relatively short scenarios are another advantage, especially if you enjoy the progression and experimentation of games like Slay the Spire but don’t always want to commit to a lengthy run.
Its colorful presentation might look fairly simple compared with some of the genre’s bigger releases, but there’s a surprising amount of strategic depth beneath those cheerful dice.
There’s even a free demo available on Steam, so you can try your hand at building the perfect set of dice before spending anything.
Just don’t be surprised if you start blaming yourself for bad rolls instead of blaming luck. After all, you’re the one who put those faces there.