Dicero

I opened Dicero expecting a time-killer, the kind where you roll some dice for fun and then go to bed. The first three stages were exactly that, until a ninety-HP mushroom blocked the road and my whole board of dice came up with just eight points.

The frustrating part isn't losing. It's knowing full well you did nothing wrong. You picked the right card, put it on the right die, and then three turns in a row the whole board landed on ones while your hero stood there taking hits. If you ever gave up on this game at exactly that feeling, the rest of this page is for you.

How a Dicero stage plays out

Each stage is a turn-based fight: you on one side, one to three monsters on the other, and whoever runs out of HP first loses. At the start of each turn the game rolls a board of dice for you, and the total number of pips is the damage of your next attack. If the roll is too ugly you can reroll, three times per stage.

The clever bit is the combo table. Two matching dice make One Pair for 1.5x, three make Three of a Kind for 2.5x, and five matching dice make Five of a Kind, a straight ten-times multiplier. So a board of small numbers that forms a combo still hits much harder than a board of big numbers that don't match.

Once the monsters are down you walk on along a straight road to the next stage, now and then finding a treasure chest that gives you an extra card. Every few stages you level up and the game offers three cards to pick one from, and that's the whole rhythm of a run.

There's one small detail it took me a few stages to notice. When there are two monsters on the field, whichever one you tap takes the whole attack. Pick the wrong target and you let the low-HP one live another turn, long enough to hit you back once more.

Five dice, but you walk into battle holding one

The thing that surprised me most came in the very first stage. The dice tray has five slots, but four of them are padlocked and you hold exactly one die. To open more you have to pick the dice-unlock card when you level up, and that card sits in the same random pool as every other card. Some runs you wait and wait and it never shows up.

This way of dealing cards really does send every run in a different direction, but it's also why the unlucky runs drag on so slowly. A single die can never form a combo, so you keep chipping away with scraps of damage while the monsters' HP gets thicker every stage.

The other cards attach directly to a specific die. One greatsword card, for example, turns a normal attack into a big slash and adds 66% damage. Put a new card on a die that already has one and the game asks you to confirm, so you have to remember which die you're building until the end of the run.

Outside battle: the campfire, talents and your gear

When a run ends you return to the campfire screen, where your hero sits by the fire under the chapter map. The chapter I was on, a forgotten green swamp, showed progress at 13 of 30 stages and a recommended power of 260, while I had only scraped together 148.

Gold picked up during runs goes into the Talent board, where you draw cards to gradually open a honeycomb of hexagons that add permanent stats. The first draw costs 15 gold, the second already 25, and the price keeps climbing, so this board eats gold faster than you'd think.

The gear screen has six equipment slots, plus Treasure, Outfit, Transformation and Mount branches that stay locked until later. Each item has twenty upgrade levels and a table of five passive lines, three of which stay hidden until you raise the item's quality.

Where the game starts squeezing you

The New Game button at the campfire isn't free. Every run costs you ten stamina, and stamina only refills over time, so after a few runs in a row you're out and have to go do something else. It's the familiar mobile grind, nothing more and nothing less.

A full stamina bar is 60 points. The newcomer gifts pushed me up to 130, which is thirteen runs, and I burned through nearly all of it in one evening. After that first session, the pace slows down on its own.

The real-money side lives in the shop, where gear chests are opened with keys and a line of text promises a guaranteed S-grade Epic within fifty pulls. The cheapest diamond pack is $0.99 for 60, and the biggest is $99.99 for 7,680.

Put those two together and the picture is pretty clear. Your power comes from gear and talents, and both go through the gacha. The game's roadmap promises more: chapter 6 opens a poison dice school, and chapters 10 and 20 each hand you an extra die already unlocked. So the gap between free players and paying ones widens with every chapter.

The mod unties two knots, and one I couldn't test

The MOD menu sits behind the red button on the left edge of the screen. It opens to three rows of switches and two sliders, and you can toggle them even in the middle of a fight. The one worth the money is called Force dice to roll 6, and it does exactly what the name says.

I set the chance slider to 80% and went in. On most turns all five dice landed on six, the Five of a Kind x10 banner popped up, and the hit did 323 damage. Drag the slider back to 0 and keep fighting, and the dice go back to ones and threes like the original, with damage dropping into the teens. In other words, you get to choose how strong you want to be.

The second one is Unlock battle speed-up, and I left it on the whole session. The original game locks the speed button, and its fastest setting is really only 1.5x even though the button says x2. With the mod on, three taps took the button to x4 and the whole fight ran exactly four times faster.

A few things to know up front so your expectations are right:

• At 100% every turn is all sixes, and it gets boring fast because there's nothing left to think about, so I settled on 80% and found it just fun enough.
• Every new stage resets the speed button to x1 and you have to tap it again, but it never locks again, so it only takes a tap.
• I couldn't rate the Skip ads row, because I played all the way to chapter 2 and the game never once offered me an ad, so there was nowhere to try it.
• The mod only touches what runs on your phone; progress and rewards still come from the server, so don't expect it to conjure gold or diamonds out of thin air.

How it feels to actually play

What I like most is the look: clean pixel art and slash animations where every strike reads clearly. The moment all five dice flip to six and the damage number shoots up is genuinely satisfying. That's what kept me playing longer than I meant to.

The settings even include a 60 fps option for stronger phones. My complaint is that the game is strictly online: cut the connection, relaunch, and it sits at the Login button no matter how many times you tap it.

Before you reach the campfire, the game makes you pick a server from a list marked by connection quality. Your profile also has a Guild field and a ranking field, both empty for newcomers. To be fair, this is an online live-service game, not a pocket game for when you've lost signal.

On the store, Dicero holds 4.4 stars from 31,788 ratings and more than a million downloads, a nice number for a game that launched in April. In player reviews, the two complaints that come up most are the pressure to spend and the feeling that the dice are rigged, which are exactly the two things the mod touches.

So who should download it

If you want something to tap at in your downtime that still gives you something to work out, the dice combo table here is a fresh enough idea to hold you for a few evenings. Each stage takes a few dozen seconds, there's nothing to memorize, and the first stage teaches you everything.

And if you installed it once and quit because the whole board seemed to have turned against you, the mod fixes exactly that rather than stuffing you with fake currency. You still pick cards and still build your dice; the pips just stop being the thing that decides whether you get to move on.