Ophelia Payne

If you are not familiar with the game of Farkle, it is a classic push-your-luck dice game played with six dice. The main goal is to be the first player to reach 10,000 or more points by rolling scoring combinations, banking your points, and avoiding a “Farkle”—which happens when a roll produces zero points, losing your accumulated points during that turn. It has a lot of similarities to Yahtzee and is fairly easy to pick up, but difficult to master.

What happens when you take the game of Farkle and add in a roguelike element that happens to take place in a tavern setting? Dice Tavern: Farkle Roguelike has arrived to show you that answer.

I have played Farkle in the past and decided I didn’t need to do the tutorial because of that. Boy, was I wrong. After sitting for a while and scoring 0 points, I decided to take my dice, swallow my pride and play the tutorial. After that, I was addicted!!

Not only do you have the standard Farkle rules, scoring with 1s, 5, and 3 of a kind, for example. Every round pays out gold, and you can visit the tavern merchant and purchase upgrades to help you. Dice that favour a specific number, increase the odds of rolling combos, even positions that can bring you additional bonus points, coin or other favours. While you might not think you need these in the early game, they became invaluable as I moved through the taverns and encountered players that also used items to decrease my scores.

Plan your dice loadout accordingly because as you move up the ladder of opponents, you need higher scores to win; you will have fewer rounds to accomplish it, and deal with the above-mentioned counter items. While a standard Farkle, for example, only forfeits that turn’s points, some opponents were able to use an upgrade that wiped out my entire score if I Farkle’d. Never a good time. The opponents really changed the game, and just when I thought I was unstoppable, I was sent packing again.

Some of my favourite dice favoured the 1s and 5s, and some of my favourite badges gave me bonus points for every 1, 5 or multiple that I banked. Trying to decide on whether to bank a single 5 to take advantage of a multiplier badge, or bank multiple 5s became a mental game unto itself.

I loved that each roll had weight, each turn was a balance of risk and reward and knowing when to go for it versus banking your points could either give you a big return or end up sending you back to the beginning of the game. 

I loved the music in the demo, and it felt like I was sitting in a tavern listening to a bard.

There is a demo available now on Steam, with the full game planned for Q3. Check it out through this link: Dice Tavern: Farkle Roguelike

Until next time…be good to yourself and be good to each other.

**Special Thanks to HarrisonWorld for the review code**