Tactical dice-rolling roguelike combat. Take control of 5 heroes, each with their own unique dice. Fight your way through 20 levels of monsters and try to take on the final boss. If you lose a single fight you have to start over so be careful (and lucky!).
Slice & Dice is a turn-based dice roguelike where you control a party of five characters and move fight to fight, upgrading a character or giving out an item after each battle. Mechanically simple, it becomes very strategic through its huge pool of characters, items, upgrades and enemies. He already covered it in his top 10 of 2024, so he keeps this short. He calls it one of the better games he played last year and places it in high A tier, above Cobalt Core, and recommends it widely because it is so approachable.
Liked
Enormous amount of content: many characters, game modes, and very distinct items
Simple rules that scale into deep strategy
Forgiving, casual structure: full regeneration between fights, nothing permanent lost within a run
Every run and every fight feels different; enemies have unique mechanics, like mini-games
Generous dice flexibility: keep or reroll any dice up to three times, softening RNG
Simple but fitting visuals and a chill, peaceful soundtrack with many tracks
Very approachable, easy to recommend to anyone who likes strategy games
Disliked
Acknowledges a fair amount of RNG because of the dice, though mitigated by rerolls
Visuals are simple (said as a neutral/fitting trait rather than a real complaint)
Top 10 of 2024 (#6)
Slice & Dice is a turn-based dungeon-crawling roguelike built around dice rolls, where you control five heroes, each with their own die, across 20 levels. Every monster brings a small mechanic that works like a fresh puzzle. He finds it easy to pick up but hard to master, and he values the huge amount of content and the optional bypass for locked content. It sits at number 6 on his 2024 list, and he describes it as a perfect game to return to now and then.
Liked
Each monster has a small mechanic to adapt to, making every fight feel like a new puzzle
Two extra rerolls per die pick the desired result and reduce randomness compared with other dice games
Simple, easy-to-understand core gameplay that is easy to learn but hard to master
Large content volume: over 25 game modes, 128 heroes and 470 unique items
Option to bypass all achievement-locked content, good for a casual game
Surprising number of accessibility options
Trying new modes and characters gives a fresh experience each time, great to revisit
Disliked
Dice-based roguelikes generally struggle to balance strategy with randomness (he says this about the genre, which Slice & Dice mitigates)
Much content is locked behind achievements, and some of those unlocks have more complicated mechanics that may not suit new players
A tactical dice-rolling roguelike by solo developer Tann where you command a party of five heroes whose abilities live on their own dice, fighting through 20 levels to a final boss with permadeath on a single lost fight.
Slice & Dice is received as a small-scale but unusually deep indie gem. Steam shows 'Overwhelmingly Positive' (about 97% of roughly 2,580 reviews) and itch.io shows 4.9/5 from about 766 ratings, with many reviewers saying they first bought it on mobile or itch and then bought it again on Steam. Only three critic reviews exist, all on the iOS version (TouchArcade 100, 148Apps 100, GAMES.CH 82), with no Metascore yet, and Metacritic users give 8.4 from only 7 ratings. It is not early access and appears actively maintained (itch build 3.2.13 in May 2025 added several translations), but sales sit in the low-to-mid hundreds of thousands of owners rather than hit territory. The negatives are narrow: RNG frustration, unknown late bosses, obtuse item text, uneven balance and awkward modding.
Players love
Every turn plays like a compact tactical puzzle because you choose which dice to reroll and how to assign results to heroes, so luck feels manageable rather than arbitrary
Class identity is built directly into each hero's die faces, which makes the 100+ heroes feel mechanically distinct
Enormous build and replay variety: hundreds of items, many monsters and modes, and randomly generated heroes, items and spells still producing new combos after hundreds of hours
Surprisingly strong balance and non-obvious decisions (junk tier-0 items having synergies, skipping level-ups, committing to one combo unit)
Undo/take-back lets you experiment with lines and treat fights as puzzles
Short runs suit both desktop and phone; many describe it as the ultimate time-killer on a bus or break
Modding via the built-in TextMod system and level editor is praised by some as the easiest custom-content sharing they have seen, extending replayability indefinitely
Distinct minimalist pixel art and music; good value at about $9 and a no-AI-assets, no-sales-or-bundles stance from the dev
Common complaints
High RNG variance: a run lost to bad rolls, especially at the final boss, can feel demoralizing and some reviewers dismiss it as RNG slop
Unknown bosses and the final boss create a risk-management problem, since you cannot prepare for something you have not seen
Item and ability descriptions are described as poorly worded and obtuse, and a few items are reported as non-functional
Balance is uneven: some classes or heroes are called useless or a burden while others dominate
Permadeath after a single lost fight means a long run can end abruptly
Presentation is deliberately small, so players wanting big visuals, story or narrative adventure will find it thin
Some find the core loop simply not fun or hard to get into if they dislike adapting to imperfect rolls
Can feel tedious
Losing at the final boss after a long run, especially with no foreknowledge of what it will be
Unlock progression: players who want to try mods or all content have to progress through the game first
Decoding cryptic item text and learning which weird items actually work
Modding workflow based on copying and pasting text files, which one refunder called the worst modding experience they had seen
Dice-builders in general can feel unrewarding: a low-playtime reviewer simply could not see how the loop is meant to be fun
What's unique
Heroes are literally dice: each class's kit is encoded in the faces of its die, with 3D dice physics and selective rerolls
Lose one fight and the run ends, yet every fight is solvable-feeling because of undo and careful dice assignment
Ultra-minimalist design (no XP system, small numbers) that reviewers compare to chance-operations art and to Balatro and Vampire Survivors in spirit
Native TextMod API and level editor let the community build total conversions, including a Slay the Spire-style mod
Huge content library from a single developer working about seven years: 128 hero classes, 73 monsters and 473 items per the Steam page, plus difficulty modifiers and Nightmare mode
Same game across Steam, itch.io, Android and iOS, with cross-platform fans buying it multiple times
Players want
Rewrite item and spell descriptions so effects are clear and accurate
Give players some way to know or preview the possible final boss and unknown bosses so they can plan
Rebalance weak classes/heroes and fix non-functional items
Make mod installation less convoluted; a negative reviewer objected to mods being gated behind progression and imported as pasted text
Offer a built-in unlock-everything option for players who do not want to grind unlocks (requested in a review)
Summarised from Steam reviews and community discussion.
Tier list Part 3 (2025)
Slice & Dice is a turn-based dice roguelike where you control a party of five characters and move fight to fight, upgrading a character or giving out an item after each battle. Mechanically simple, it becomes very strategic through its huge pool of characters, items, upgrades and enemies. He already covered it in his top 10 of 2024, so he keeps this short. He calls it one of the better games he played last year and places it in high A tier, above Cobalt Core, and recommends it widely because it is so approachable.
Liked
Disliked