Tumble: A Cozy Dice Roguelite

The kitchen table is set. The dice are warm. Someone's knocking. Tumble starts with a game you already know: five dice, a scorecard, three of a kind, full house, the big straight. Fill your card, beat the target, collect your winnings. Then the shop opens, and the house rules go out the window. Build around the dice, the card, or the shelf. Paint new faces onto your dice. Turn them to gold, to glass, to something luckier. Practice the boxes on your scorecard until choosing Sixes pays like a jackpot.

And line your shelf with charms, 53 of them, that turn "a decent roll" into a scoring system your grandmother would call cheating. Buy a sixth die and the card grows. Three Pair and Two Triplets sit greyed on your scorecard from the very first turn, waiting. Find the money for an extra die mid-run and they light up for good, and a seventh die opens the rarest box in the game. The card you finish with is not the card you started with.

Strange visitors take a seat. Every ante ends with a boss at your table: the Tax Man collects, the Toddler grabs a die, the Fog rolls in, and the Critic is never impressed twice. Twelve visitors bend the round their own way, and at ante 8, the thirteenth has been expecting you. Play the right box, not the best box.…