There have been quite a few stories in pop culture that portray the Devil and demons partaking in some games of chance. Booting up Dice Versa you find yourself in that exact situation, engaged in a dice game for your soul with the titular Demon of Luck, Versa. We don’t know how we got here. All we know is that we have to play this to survive, or at the least, delay the inevitable.
When you first load into the game, you will be forgiven for thinking it's going to be straightforward. You have three dice that you need to place on a board which replenishes when they're all used. However, you can only place a die next to those of the same colour or value. When you make a line or a column of four, they disappear all Tetris-like and reward you with points. But things would be boring if it were that easy.
As the rounds advance, you’ll have to place more die at a time, with more values and colours thrown into the mix. You will also have to contend with a special die; a Joker variant that can be anything, one that clears the whole board, and a timer-based one that self-destructs when it reaches zero, that you can’t use in a combo. Its whole life purpose is to take a spot from the board, and you will despise it.
It sounds simple, but as the board becomes congested, you have fewer and fewer places to place your pieces. You need to fulfil the placement criteria on all sides, and it is incredibly easy to accidentally render spaces virtually unusable until you get the almighty Joker dice. It is a simple premise, but when the rounds tick on, it gets tricky but remains good fun.
The graphics for this duel of the souls are fairly minimal. You will spend your time staring at a board held by a demon, which we can assume is Versa. Her design is interesting, even if we don’t see much. She has four arms, and horns and is a giant given the size of the board she has in her mitts. Versa also sports a single anklet because soul-stealing demons need to accessorise. It makes for an intriguing view of what could have been a simple display.
Since a bulk of the mechanics revolve around colours, it would be fair to assume that those of us with colourblindness would have to give this a miss, right? Fortunately, that's not the case, as RagTag Games has included a toggle for a colourblindness mode, which is a particularly nice touch. It keeps the dice coloured but adds a few stripes to differentiate the types. You can also turn off the haptic feedback and screen shake if they make you queasy.
If you are particularly enjoying the game, you can pay £2.99 to remove ads. The problem with this, however, and it's a problem just for the developer, is there are barely any ads. You get one when you finish a game and select retry, and that's it, and you can skip it pretty quickly. You can choose to watch a full advert and start a game with three re-rolls, so presumably, you’d have the option to start that with no ads, but even then, the price is a bit steep just for that. Essentially it's a button for if you love the game and can spare some cash.
