Dice Legacy
Review

Dice Legacy (2021) is a city-building simulation game where dice represent your civilians. You roll the dice and then place the skill that lands face-up on the map to gather resources, expand your outpost, or fight hostile invaders in real time. It combines chance-based dice rolls with staple city-building mechanics to reveal how the game is deciding your progress.

You're initially given five six-sided dice representing peasants under your rule. Each one has various actions shown on the faces: gathering crops, mining for resources, building new buildings and so on. You roll them each turn and place each one to perform their face-up action on specific areas of the map. In this way, you build out your settlement, increase your population and gain new classes of civilians, each with different abilities. You also encounter hostile tribesmen, who you defeat in strategic fights.

However, with each roll of the dice their stamina decreases so you have to refresh them at the tavern regularly. This extra layer adds a risk-reward strategy as you want to keep all dice in play, but to do so risks losing them and diminishing your power. You can also combine and experiment on dice to enhance their abilities or make them more strongly favour landing on a specific face. Then there are the changing seasons that affects play, as winter stops crops from growing and freezes your civilians if they stay out for too long.

The result is a deeply tactical game that wears its stats on its sleeve. You can always see exactly how you are doing and what the odds of success are by how many dice you have and what you have rolled. Unlike other games where this isn't seen, you can use this to play the game how you want.

Our examiner, Ben Kendall, first checked Dice Legacy 16 months ago. It was re-examined by Jo Robertson and updated 16 months ago.