Remove the randomness of dice with smart thinking and maths
NEED TO KNOW
RELEASE February 2024 (Early Access)
DEVELOPER Guidelight Games
PUBLISHER Ghost Ship Publishing
LINK spellrogue.com
SpellRogue is a roguelike that makes you feel like a genius. As you pick up spells you’ll start to create combinations that just feel too powerful and would surely have been nerfed if the developer had noticed. Then, after a while, you’ll realise this is exactly what they wanted you to do.
Best described as SlaytheSpirebut with dice, SpellRogueis less about building a big deck of spells and more about making the most of your limited options. You’ll start out a run with three base spells and can add up to four more. You’ll have access to all seven spells every turn, but you will need to roll some dice and get some luck to use them. Some require specific numbers whereas others just require a numerical total, so you could put a six, a three and a one into a spell that requires a value of ten to cast it.
There’s a good amount of variety in what the spells can do, but for the most part, they all boil down to three main areas. Spells that do damage, spells that give you a shield for incoming damage and spells that either give you a positive status effect or your enemy a negative one. While you can build an all-out damage set of spells that all require high dice rolls, you’ll quickly realise that luck plays too much of a factor in fights, and to succeed you need to minimise the randomness as much as possible.
THERE’S A GOOD AMOUNT OF VARIETY IN WHAT THE SPELLS CAN DO
PLAYED IT
I’M A GENIUS
The first time I beat SpellRoguemy system was all about rolling ones. Thanks to an upgrade to a spell I got early, whenever I dropped in a one it would do four damage to any enemy, and give me +1 barrier. A barrier is a permanent shield that regenerates every time you hit End Turn and I could cast this spell three times a turn giving me a massive automatic block after just a few rounds of combat as well as dealing damage.
But rolling three ones, when by default you only roll three dice per turn, is almost impossible. So that’s where I purposely selected spells that could influence the dice. By the end of my run, I had multiple spel
