Dice Dice Baby – A Balatro-style casino game about cheating?!

Steam Next Fest shot a variety of indie games into the spotlight, including roguelikes such as Dice Dice Baby. If you’ve put hundreds of hours into games like Balatro, Dice Dice Baby could be your next obsession.

Dice Dice Baby gameplay is about rolling high combinations using dice on a tabletop to beat the House. They aren’t ordinary dice, but dice with special abilities that you can upgrade to create combinations to achieve challenging totals the House assigns. The concept is simple, but the replayability and potential for game-breaking builds result in an addictive formula.

What is Dice Dice Baby?

The Dice Dice Baby gambling mechanics encourage you to cheat to beat the house. The premise is to roll dice, which are used to create combinations to score enough points to beat the round score target in a limited number of banks, and move to the next round. When you roll the dice, you will choose the dice on the table that you want to keep, which will lock the value of the dice you rolled. You can reroll three times per round in an attempt to better the value of weaker dice. Then, bank the dice you’ve locked in to score them.

After each round, you will earn money to spend at the shop to acquire perks and cheated dice (essentially dice that wield different abilities). You earn one coin for each bank you don’t use, plus one coin for every five coins you have at the end of a round, up to a maximum of five. When you collect enough dice of the same shape or type, that’s when the Dice Dice Baby roguelike synergy bonuses activate.

The Hot Dice, for example, grants a plus one multiplier the first time they are scored in a combination. However, if you collect three Hot Dice, expect to get a plus three base score per total multiplier, while having six of this kind of dice adds a plus one multiplier for every combination they are scored in.

The Dice Dice Baby demo allows you to experiment with lucky charms that provide passive abilities. A Button Token contributes 30 score per empty bank slot, a Champion Trophy that grants three coins if the round is won on the first bank, and a Coupon that gives free perks and cheated dice shop rerolls after every round are just three examples out of the 87 lucky charms that will be in the full game.

That’s not all, as the full experience will consist of three difficulty levels, 36 dice synergies, and board upgrades in randomly generated runs, all to help you create dominant combinations to beat the increasingly difficult targets the unforgiving House sets.

When is Dice Dice Baby coming out?

The game will launch on Steam on November 5, 2025. It has also been announced that the Dice Dice Baby price tag will be $4.99, with the developers stating in an update on Steam that they “feel like it’s a fair price for the amount of content available, while remaining affordable as a small indie game.” A launch sale will apply, bringing the price down even further for the first few weeks after the game’s debut.

Who’s developing Dice Dice Baby?

The Dice Dice Baby developer is Nugget Games Studio, an indie studio whose first game will be Dice Dice Baby. Since the demo for the game was released back in September, Nugget Games Studio has responded to player feedback by making updates to the demo in the form of balancing difficulty settings, lucky charms, and synergies, as well as adding new features and making important bug fixes.

How does Dice Dice Baby compare to Balatro and other casino-based games?

Dice Dice Baby is all about rolling dice and bending the rules to reach a given total in a limited number of rolls. The numerical output from rolling a dice is hit-or-miss, but the unique dice, lucky charms, and synergies that come from combinations can take the randomness out of Dice Dice Baby gameplay to be able to complete progressively harder objectives.

It is comparable in this way to Balatro, but Dice Dice Baby is a tabletop dice roguelike, rather than adopting Poker mechanics like the card-based deckbuilder Balatro does. Compared to other casino-style games, however, Dice Dice Baby shares similarities with Dice A Million, a roguelike deckbuilder about rolling dice to achieve one million points.

How long is the Dice Dice Baby demo?

The length of time you will spend with the Dice Dice Baby demo depends on how many times you’re willing to try and fail at racking up enough score to progress to the next round. The demo has a total of 20 rounds to get through, with the final round asking you to reach a target score of 5,300 to win. Even if you do come out victorious, the in-game shop refreshes with different items to add to your build, so it’s well worth starting a new run and seeing how many powerful combinations you can come up with to beat the game.

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