Sigilfarer: your party has no cards, it has die faces, and every sword adds one

Sigilfarer's Steam page contains a section I would like to see more often: what the game does not offer. Among the answers, relaxing gameplay.

It is honest, it is funny, and it sums the thing up rather well.

The idea, which is genuinely an idea

Most dice roguelites have you roll dice. This one has you build the dice.

Your party is your dice set. Every weapon, shield and piece of armour you equip adds a face that defines your attacks, defences and abilities.

So you are not raising stats, you are composing a probability distribution. Picking up a sword is not gaining three damage, it is changing what can come up on the next roll.

For anybody who has spent an evening optimising a deck, the transposition is immediate and the effect is different: in a deckbuilder you try to control what you draw. Here you accept not controlling it, but you choose what is allowed to happen.

Around the dice

You lead up to four characters across lands broken by a magical disaster, on procedurally generated hexagonal maps.

The dice are used everywhere, which is the right decision: in turn-based combat, in out-of-combat skill checks, and even when resting to renew resources. They are not a battle mechanic dropped into an exploration game, they are the game's common language.

Each region has its biomes, perils and opportunities, and death sends you back to the start with a little more knowledge, as it should.

What it is worth

Released yesterday at 7.99 euros, developed by Viabo Games and published by Anshar Publishing, the game shows 17 positive reviews out of 22.

The sample is tiny and I am not going to pretend to extract a truth from it. What I can say is that the proposition is clear and the execution follows: the interface is legible, the accessibility options are well provided for a game this size, with colour alternatives, contrast settings and no timed input at all.

My reservation concerns chance, inevitably. A game that builds its whole progression on die faces has to give you enough control that defeat stays instructive. Sigilfarer manages by letting you modify the die rather than the roll, which is the right answer, but we will need to see over time whether bad streaks stay bearable.

And to be entirely fair to the studio, it warned you: it never promised this would be restful.

Which pieces of gear made up your most twisted die? We compare builds on the InsertCoins Discord.