SpellRogue is a dice-tossing take on the Slay the Spire format

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New deckbuilding roguelite SpellRogue has an interesting twist: You've got your cards, sure, but they're powered by a pool of dice that you re-roll each turn. The debut game of new developer Guidelight, SpellRogue focuses on building up potent combinations of spell abilities and fuelling them by rolling a pool of mana dice.

The premise is pretty simple: You've got a row of spell cards, each of which requires a dice with particular roll to activate. Each turn you roll a pool of mana dice and spend them to cast the spells. Simple enough, but it gets wild from there: Characters can twist and manipulate their dice, changing what was rolled, while certain spells return the dice used to cast them in altered form, or change that dice forever.

The early access release, of February 12, has three characters and a full campaign to play through ending in a boss fight alongside a slew of mutator effects to keep it new and interesting. Over the course of early access the developers hope to add "a new Air-themed wizard, adding new boss- and elite enemies, adding more spells, artifacts, relics, potions and mutators."

As each run goes on you're able to fill several upgrade slots on each spell, gaining effects that range from basic extra damage or a bonus target to permanently altering what dice those spells take to activate, giving dice back in return for using them, or how many times they can be activated each combat.

You also collect Artifacts as you go that do stuff like make you roll extra dice each turn, but lose health; roll extra dice, but lose all your 6s; or roll a bonus dice every time you cast 12 spells. Finally, you get powerful Ritual spells that can only be cast when you fill an energy bar. It's enough that you can probably think up some pretty neat combos.

You can find SpellRogue on Steam, where it's $16 in Early Access. It's developed by Guidelight and published by Deep Rock Galactic developers Ghost Ship.

Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.