Dice Throne Adventures – First Impressions

Review copy provided by the publisher

Reggie the Artificer, pictured above, is my champion in the campaign. I’m hopeful that he will survive with the help of his bots and my wife’s Treant spirit skills.

All of the cool people say DTA but I’ve never sat at the back of the bus so I just call it Dice Throne Adventures. It’s all of the dice-chucking delirium of Dice Throne wrapped up in a cooperative campaign game that features dungeon-crawling through encounter tiles and boss-battling against fearsome foes.

The 2020 release was combined with the Season 1 Rerolled Kickstarter campaign and offers another way to experience the 16 variable heroes of Dice Throne. Instead of sitting across (or beside) other players and competing to see who is the Ultimate (wink) champion in the Mad King’s tournament, these asymmetric fighters will join forces to defeat fallen heroes and take down the Mad King. He is after all mad. And kingslaying is more acceptable when they’re mad—looking at you, Jaime Lannister.

For the first time in the Roxley-created universe, solo play is available, so gamers will be able to enjoy Dice Throne Adventures for 1-4 players and a session (either Portal Crawl or Boss Battle) will last between 90 and 120 minutes. So buckle in because the mechanics of Dice Throne combat have been integrated into a campaign game and it’s another opportunity to fall in love with the memorable characters of the popular dice-tossing dice-tosser.

Here we go! *spoken in the same robotic clip as that AJR song*

What It Does

First things first, understand that Dice Throne Adventures is not a standalone game. You need to have at least one hero—but preferably more—from Season 1 or Season 2 of Dice Throne. That’s because the heroes and their components will be used in the game. DTA offers the environment and the new enemies that you’ll face, but players must control their champions in much the same way that they would do in the original dueling game.

Once you have those heroes, however, you can embark on a journey of exploration, danger, and hopeful victory. The cooperative game exists in two spheres: dungeon-delving Portal Crawls, which act as tile-laying exploratory missions to seek out Portal Shards and defeat the devilish minions of the Mad King, and Boss Battles, which are kinetic and fraught encounters with the more recognizable followers of the tyrannical monarch.

As with any good campaign game, there is a system of progression and players will be able to add stronger cards and abilities to their deck, which will remain over the course of the campaign. Enemies will become stronger, but so will the players, their champions’ abilities to deal with the conflict, and the knowledge or strategy of how to navigate the perilous world.

You’ll alternate between Portal Crawls and Boss Battles and then at the end of each scenario the gaming group will log their success or failure and create a log of what’s happened and how each play went.

The best part about Dice Throne is the innovative dice combat that makes Yahtzee feel like a battle royale experience, with the superlative Roxley production bringing everything to life on the table. And Dice Throne Adventures doesn’t want to diminish that luxury experience. Instead, it builds a different narrative and purpose entirely around that gameplay. Instead of directing your ire at someone around the table with you, the players coordinate, collaborate, and control the narrative by working as a team.

For players who haven’t used Dice Throne as a team game, it will allow them to explore what’s possible when you use the positive status effects and card abilities of one hero to help out another hero. It’s a fascinating part of the game that opens up new possibilities and shows nuances to characters that might have otherwise been lackluster in 1v1 scenarios.

Bring on the Tactician, Paladin, Seraph, and other support characters! They are needed on the front!

How It Does It

You’ll need to understand how the core gameplay of Dice Throne works because no matter the additions that the expansion content of Adventures introduces, it’s still that progressive dice-rolling system from the original games.

Dice Throne is a combat game that uses asymmetric characters will offensive and defensive abilities. These abilities are activated with certain dice configurations, which are achieved with custom dice sets for every combatant. Along with the custom dice is a unique deck of cards that enable instant actions or phase-specific actions for players to consider when upgrading their character (which is possible with cards from the deck), launching an attack, or defending against a player’s offensive machinations.

Players progress through phases of their turn:

1)     Upkeep – this involves persistent status effects or passive player abilities

2)     Income – this generates combat points and allows players to draw cards

3)     Main (1) – this allows players to upgrade their champion with cards from the deck and play cards to set them up for the impending offensive dice roll

4)     Offensive – roll dice, attempting to activate an ability, and use up to two rerolls to achieve what you want (cards played from either player can affect the results)

5)     Defensive – the player being attacked has a chance to mitigate, avoid, or retaliate

6)     Main (2) – a final opportunity to adjust your character before the other player’s turn

There is also a targeting phase and a discard phase, but the ones above are the most important to understand.

So, those are the basics. Dice Throne Adventures innovates on that core system and adds other gameplay elements to create a new experience.

Portal Crawl involves a tile layout on the table that forces players to explore new areas, defeat the monsters on them, and then progress to the end of the scenario after collecting certain resources.

Mechanically, it adds a few more steps—movement, revelation, and resolution—before allowing players to jump back into the combat with different enemies. Once combat starts, players revert back to the ruleset established in the original Dice Throne until the round of combat is over and another player starts their turn.

Boss Battle also adds a few more rules, but it recreates the dueling nature of the game. Instead of a 1v1 scenario with just human players, though, it’s a cooperative effort against a formidable opponent. Players will have to rely on their skills and their mechanical savvy to overcome these challenges.

All in all, it’s dice-chucking, asymmetric design, dungeon-crawling, boss fights, and cooperative play, produced in a gorgeous package and ready for Dice Throne fans to enjoy with little onboarding knowledge necessary.

Why You Might Like It

Dice Throne Adventures allows Dice Throne fans to engage in a wholly new experience, using the same characters they’ve come to love and enjoy. It keeps the gameplay familiar while increasing immersion and giving a story to a world full of exciting heroes and mesmerizing art.

If Dice Throne didn’t appeal to you before, Adventures opens up so many new possibilities, as each champion plays differently. A competitive dueling game has become a modular campaign with up to 16 different protagonists to use.

Why You Might Not

If you’re hoping that DTA might save the Dice Throne experience for you, then know it’s just an add-on at the end of the day. A wonderful, content-heavy add-on, but it still uses the combat mechanics of Dice Throne to do what it’s doing. You have to like that to like this.

The production quality is insane here and I love it but it’s also a lot of stuff. The footprint on the table when you have both seasons and DTA out is nutty. The modular inserts make setup easier, but it’s still a decent amount of things going on at the table. Be mindful of that upfront cost to playing the game.

Final Thoughts

I love Dice Throne. I want to be upfront about that. It’s one of my favorite games to play. My wife and I always have a good time when we pull out the champions and we’re excited to have another reason to jump into the universe.

We’ve only played the first Portal Crawl on the Normal difficulty and are raring to go at the first Boss Battle. Using the Treant and the Artificer, we do have an uphill climb ahead of us with these complex characters, but the challenge excites us.

I like how the battle mechanics are the same as traditional gameplay in Dice Throne. That makes the transition easier and enables players to jump into the experience faster if they have that foundational understanding. With two different game modes—Portal Crawl and Boss Battle—there will be nice variation between each session and give us a lot of options to weigh as we progress through the campaign.

And I’m enjoying the shift from competitive 1v1 or 2v2 dice-based combat to cooperative decision-making. It subtly subverts the style of Dice Throne gameplay in a way that makes it fresh and appealing—though I’ll never tire of the original game variant, likely.

If you own Dice Throne and enjoy it, I see no reason for you to not get DTA, unless you just don’t enjoy tile-laying or dungeon-crawling games.

I’ll also end my first impressions with another fanboy appreciation of the production quality that Roxley maintains with their titles. The modular inserts and organized caddies really serve to make this game accessible and easy to setup. I continue to be impressed and I’m happy to have this expansion of my Dice Throne experience.

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Do you have Dice Throne Season 1 or Season 2? Does the idea of using those same characters in another experience appeal to you? If you haven’t played Dice Throne… why haven’t you?!

Let us know in the comments and give a recommendation for other games of which to share our first impressions.