Dice of Kalma

Overall, I enjoy the gameplay but dislike a couple of mechanics and ability to play offline. From a gameplay perspective, I like the poker dice gameplay loop, and the points per round are reasonable. There are no permanent upgrades to make future runs easier, so it is truly a roguelike vs a roguelite. A big negative is how the skull modifiers are handled. For example, the skull modifiers are things like “+5 Bones and +2 Multi When playing a hand if at least one dice is equal to the sum of its two adjacent dice.” That’s one of the easier ones, but you have to remember up to 24 of those depending on where you’re at in the run. I find myself spending more time scrolling the skulls list after a few rounds. You can also get the same skull but in different colors. No idea what the colors mean, and I’ve yet to see it explained in-game. The most egregious problem is that the game just completely locks up my phone if I lose connectivity. I was playing the game on a roadtrip, and it crashed so hard in low connectivity situations that my iPhone 16 Pro restarted itself. Twice. I’ve even paid for the ad unlock, so there is no excuse for this behavior. Without ads, everything should be client-side, but it is clear there is something server-side when completing a round that isn’t handled gracefully. It really soured me on the game.

I see a lot of people commenting how hard it is to win in this game. I actually think that’s a positive. I played a lot of games that I’ve enjoyed a lot where eventually I do everything there is to do and then I just lose my incentive to keep playing. Even though I’ve already won in dice of kalma I still enjoy playing because it’s so hard to win again. It’s a great game and while I can certainly suggest some improvements I think it’s currently very well done.

Maybe I’m just skilled issued but I tend to be pretty good at roguelikes and here I can’t even get halfway through the stages. After failing around 30 different attempts going with the flow of which skulls I had to choose from, I specifically tried to make a 4 and 5 of a kind run around 10-15 times in a row, picking the skulls that would seem most likely to help, but it would always fail around stage 11. I know the main point of the game is luck rolling dice, but at least in other similar games like luck be a landlord or balatro you never feel like it’s completely out of your hand or just due to bad luck. Maybe there needs to be a third type of strategic system to help you progress rather than just skulls. Or a deeper layer to the game after you beat it once and then it gets harder. I’ll definitely be playing more though and see what happens.