Dice Legacy

A smart, peculiar city builder that ends in a gruelling uphill battle against a rival city.

I can't fault Dice Legacy's style, but this deckbuilding puzzle game disguised as a city builder is mostly an exercise in furious, tooth-grinding frustration.

Two of my favourite things in the world are video games and board games and when they collide, woo-hoo, exciting times ahoy! I knew nothing about Dice Legacy going in but I knew it had dice and was a video game so most of the battle had already been won, let’s roll the dice and hope for an enjoyable video game board game mashup.

Optimizing the best dice combination that you can think of when building your civilization has surprisingly been fun for me. Playing this game will require a lot of patience and engaging blindly without a solid plan will ruin the fun.

Overall, Dice Legacy is a very fresh and creative entry in a genre that can often feel like every game is just a reskin of another. The use of dice to randomize the actions available and the steady pace of external events changes this from a game of long-term strategy to one of improvisation and reaction. Clean, visually appealing art style wars with a slightly too large UI scale that can obscure much of the play area. Great for people who like to think on their feet and maintain a decent rate of action and excitement for extended periods. Not an at-your-own pace city builder like Cities: Skylines or other descendants of SimCities, however, so look elsewhere if you’re after a quiet, relaxing time.

While the gameplay is impressively innovative, the execution falls flat due to poor pacing and a badly designed learning curve.

Dice Legacy is a fun take on the city-builder genre with dice as your workers, though it did take me several hours to get my head around all the main mechanics and research better build/research orders.

Dice Legacy does have some interesting ideas under its belt, and I’m excited to keep exploring the various strategies and play styles that its robust tech tree has in store. I find the experience quite taxing with how much improvisation and compromise it demands, so I’m saving it for a time where I’m in the mood for careful, organised play. If the idea of a strategy game with an unusual twist piques your interest, Dice Legacy is a great game to pick up – on PC. As enjoyable as the game is, the poor optimisation means Switch owners would do well to look elsewhere.

If you have read this review up till now, I thank you, you will probably have guessed by reading the review that I am not about to give Dice Legacy a really high score. The UI and the game’s lack of a proper tutorial need a lot of improvements to receive a higher score than..

Dice Legacy leaves a lasting impression of something basic in concept but tremendous in possibilities. With bucolic aesthetics and a simply lovely soundtrack to match, Dice Legacy wants players to know that dice-based gameplay can be incredibly deep and immediately addicting. Would I recommend this survival city-builder on the Switch? Certainly, but only if PC isn’t an option; if you’ve got a Steam account, head there first for the far more intuitive gameplay both you and Dice Legacy deserve.