Dice A Million is another attempt at Balatroification of another simple game. CloverPit was slots, RACCOIN was coin-pushers, this is dice. It’s not an actual specific dice game like Craps or whatever, it’s far simpler: you’ve got a pool of dice (and dice-like-objects), you pull 8 of them, pick 5, throw them, score. You have a set number of rolls to hit a target aggregate score. That’s it.

You start with a mix of D3’s (don’t think too hard) and D4’s, and in-between rounds you get to spend your pips to buy / sell progressively weirder dice to make it easier to score higher and higher. As expected, these start with normal dice – D5, D6, D8, D10, D20 – and then it rapidly explodes out into bizarre dice like bottles of soda, tin cans, coins to flip, dice that have a second die inside, marbles, all kinds of nonsense.

Unlike Balatro, there is a slight physics simulation angle to the game, where your throw is simulated in 3D on the side of the screen for each roll, and some dice do things in the dice tray. Some have modifiers where they pull other dice to them after coming to a stop, others have modifiers where they have special bonus scoring effects when they’re near other dice, or have special modifiers if they’re not near other dice, but unlike Rune Dice there’s no strategy or aiming or anything, your control over the dice is completely limited to what you pick.

That’s my core problem with this game, and it’s essentially my same issue with all other games trying to be Balatro: There simply isn’t enough going on with the base underlying game. Balatro is conceptually interesting just with a normal deck of normal cards and zero jokers. There’s strategy to be had in intentionally deciding what to play, what to discard, what to dig for. It’s plenty engaging just with that, and while there are more unique shuffle-states that can be made with a deck of cards than there are atoms in the universe, the level of randomness feels like something you can understand, hold in your head, and have some kind of influence over. You don’t get that with slots, you don’t get that with roulette, you don’t get that with coin-pushers, and you certainly don’t get that with a sack of dice.

Accordingly, all these games have to rely heavily on their wacky monkey-cheese omg-so-random modifiers, trinkets, cards, rings, enchanted greebles, and so on. Balatro has that stuff – obviously – but there the modifiers enhance the already-strong fundamental system, whereas that’s all these other games have.

I played it on Game Pass for a couple hours. It felt like it might have had The Juice based on my first couple runs, but it wore out fast. I would not have paid full price for it, and I can’t recommend it. It’s not bad, there just isn’t enough there.