Dice A Million

Balatro, but with dice

Dice A Million takes the run-based deckbuilder formula that Balatro popularized and swaps cards for a bag of more than 120 different dice, each with its own effect, as you try to roll your way to a million points before a facility of escalating debts and bosses grinds you down. Reviewers reach for the comparison constantly, and mean it as a compliment more often than not. "Honestly, best runner up for 'If you liked Balatro.' And it's not close boi'," wrote one. Another described the relationship in more detail: "Obviously the game's visuals take heavy inspiration from Balatro, but it does a lot of things in an interesting and unique way, so calling it 'Balatro with dice' would be unfair. There are a lot of well thought out game design decisions that make the game very rewarding to play." A more skeptical reviewer admitted the resemblance is close enough to be distracting: "it feels like this game was created as a test tube baby in a lab to be as similar to Balatro as possible, but with dice instead of cards. Nothing wrong with that, the game is still a lot of fun". One reviewer went further, arguing the game beats its inspiration on small conveniences: "there is a 'skip animations' setting, which in Balatro, requires a mod to achieve. Minor QoL things like that are EVERYWHERE in this game."

Building numbers that go up

The moment-to-moment loop of gathering dice, rings, and enchantments into a scoring engine draws consistent praise. "Having 60+ dice in your bag and throwing tons of them each round is very fun," wrote one reviewer, while another summed up the appeal in four lines: "Roll dice. Number go up. Get ring. Number go up fast. Find boss. Stops your dice going up fast." A longtime player who logged over 100 hours getting every achievement called it "superbly addictive," and a reviewer who bought the game after playing its demo praised the presentation directly: "Fantastic game, amazing music, amazing mechanics, amazing aesthetic, was waiting 6+ months for the release and was not disappointed! The builds are fun, the card system, dice interactions, and rings are all a blast to play with".

When a boss ends your run for free

The single loudest, most repeated complaint in the entire review sample — voiced independently by dozens of reviewers on both sides of the recommend line — is that certain boss modifiers can completely invalidate a carefully built run with no way to adapt or counter it. One of the most detailed accounts laid out the pattern boss by boss: "There is a boss that disables your dice until you've gone through your entire stack once. Too many dice? Too bad! There is a boss that locks all your dice into doing their lowest roll. You were building on high base numbers? Too bad! There is a boss that makes any roll above a six negative. Building on high base numbers? Too bad again!" The same reviewer, who logged over 400 hours, concluded: "This isn't Balatro and these bosses counter basic building blocks of the game that almost every build will be based on to a relatively high degree." A second reviewer described the identical structural problem from a different angle: "there is a Boss called 'The Patient', During this boss fight you are not allowed to use your dice until they've been played once. So guess what happens when on the previous stage you get a crazy good amount of currency and have +70 dice in your inventory? You are just screwed".

What makes this pattern notable is how often it shows up inside otherwise positive, recommending reviews too. "This is where a neutral button would be nice. Love this game to death. Wonderful gameplay loop... But I will not be giving this game a thumbs up until something is done about the balancing, and especially the bosses," wrote one reviewer who still ultimately recommended it, adding that the boss fights "are all pretty much set up to make you feel like everything you've been building up to has been for nothing." Another recommending reviewer put it more bluntly: "I really enjoy this game but the bosses ruin prefect runs. Needs to be better balanced." A third, weighing in on the same issue from the negative column, connected it to a specific frustration with the economy: "removing dice scales extremely fast and if you aren't able to find a working build quickly you will NOT be able to make it through."

Compounding problems: cost scaling and a save wipe

The boss-counterplay issue is worsened, according to several reviewers, by how expensive it becomes to remove or reroll dice mid-run. "The incremental (if not exponential) removing dice cost and reroll cost is too high for any players to enjoy... It sucks the fun out of the game and it transforms a fun dice game into a debt management one," wrote one reviewer, who suggested the game needs difficulty tiers similar to Balatro's stakes system. A separate reviewer flagged a data-integrity problem distinct from balance: "I was having fun with the game until my cloud save reset? Not sure what happened, but lost ALL progress." Another reviewer raised a smaller but related trust issue, noting the game's own on-screen effect-order display doesn't always match what actually happens: "The biggest issue with the game giving you wrong information though is where it tells you the effects of the dice stack in an optimal order. Unfortunately I've observed this to not be the case".

Verdict

Dice A Million has real ambition and a genuinely satisfying core loop — the sheer number of dice, rings, and synergies to discover, paired with music and presentation reviewers consistently single out as excellent, make a strong case for the genre's newest Balatro-alike. What holds it back from a stronger recommendation is a boss-design problem that isn't a minority complaint or a difficulty-tuning nitpick — it's the single most repeated observation across the entire review sample, made independently by recommending and non-recommending players alike, describing the same specific failure mode: a boss whose effect happens to counter your build ends the run with no tool to adapt, reroll, or work around it. Layer on dice-removal costs that scale aggressively enough to make recovery impractical and at least one reported save-wipe, and this is a game whose foundation reviewers largely love sitting inside a difficulty curve many of the same reviewers describe as broken rather than hard. Worth it for genre fans willing to tolerate real frustration in exchange for a deep, well-presented build-crafting loop.