I'm a board gamer. I'm a (currently former) role player. I know my dice. My die? Whatever. I also know Devil Dice, for it is one of the demos on the greatest demo disc in history (Official PlayStation Magazine UK No. 42, in case you're wondering).
However... Video games have surprised me before, and they'll surprise me again. It has been around 19 and half years since that demo disc made it into my hands, and it has taken that long for me to learn that this game started like as a Net Yaroze project - a homebrew, of sorts.
Mind blown. I've kinda ruined the Fun Fact segment of this post now. Should have saved it.
Moving on...
Fun Times
Devil Dice is a game with a bunch of modes that are centred around one simple mechanic - matching sides of a six-sided die until they zap themselves into a load of much more useful points.
You play as a... baby? A fairy? I've no idea what, but you're small enough to run along the top of these dice and strong and agile enough to flip them from one side to another as you go. Flip a two next to another two, and the two will disappear. Flip a group of four fours together and they'll disappear too. Keep adding the right number into the group before it disappears and your points keep increasing.
Frustrations
I've known how Devil Dice plays for nearly twenty years, and yet my first run was awful. It's like my knowledge of dice just fell out of my brain, leaving me to flail wildly and hope for the best. Instead of thinking ahead and going for an obvious group, or just slowing down to take things one step at a time, I was running like a maniac across the field getting excited at coming close to a matching set.
And then, in my state of glee at having finally matched something, I forgot that you could fall off the dice and have to wander around the grid pushing things instead. Dice don't flip when they're pushed, which - while beneficial in some situations - isn't the point of the game. Every now and then, lightning zaps another die into life, and you've got to leg it over there to catch it as it rises.
Further Fun Times
Eventually, I fell into a more useful strategy - namely the point scoring kind - and proudly finished the round with some big chains of sixes, with some 1s added in there for fun. They all disappear if you link them to a completed group, which looks nice. There's probably an expert who says it's not the optimum strategy to get rid of them, but what do I know?
I failed to make it anywhere close to the top of the leaderboard, even with five minutes of uninterrupted gaming. Oh well. Onto the Battle Mode.
I can only assume at the rules to this man-on-man mode because I've not actually looked them up. What appears to happen is that each group of dice you manage to delete goes into a checklist of sorts. If you manage to get four groups, you win the battle, but it's not much of a fight if you're basically doing the time trial - even if there's a CPU character to muck up all your dice.
No, instead, the fight comes in the fact that if you make a group of four, for example, after your opponent does, you steal that group from him. In a race to four groups of any (different) numbers, stealing groups in any fashion is going to be a key tactic. If they're making a big group of six, finish it off before they get a chance. If you only need one more group to win, get a two. Steal it. Gloat.
It's a nice little mode, but there are two more, and the next is insanity.
'Wars' sees you go up against four other freaks, all rolling around the same table, flipping the same dice, in what appears to be a last man standing match. Again, I don't know the rules, but it's going to be something like 'flipping dice into groups is good, and dillydallying is bad', so I did what came naturally - I got overwhelmed and panicked.
I didn't win, but I know I didn't lose either. I might have come third. I don't know. I don't even know how you score, but 3P looked like he dominated the round. There are three rounds in each game, but I thought it was a bit too much for my skill level right now, and headed into the final mode instead.
I remember the Puzzle mode from the demo, and it's probably the best tutorial that you're going to get for Devil Dice, because it goes over the whole adding to already completed groups, pushing blocks, removing the 1s and so on really quickly, before getting really devilish.
I'm sure I was struck into a moment of dumb, but I blanked early on in this mode, but should I ever remember how to brain, I'll know that there are at least 20 challenging puzzles to keep me busy in between the other maddening modes.
Final Word
They should keep you busy, too, because Devil Dice is a little gem of a game that you should try out. Fans of Sokoban, and puzzles like it, will feel at home in the puzzle mode. Fans of local multiplayer will have a blast with the various competitive modes. Fans of logical or vaguely strategic games will easily pass the time in a time trial, and all of these gamers are kept entertained by a weird little thing waddling around on some dice.
It looks cheap, it sounds cheap, but it's got depth, and whenever you fire up the greatest demo disc in history, you too will give it another go, just because it deserves it. Roll some dice some time.
Fun Times
Devil Dice was popular enough to get sequels, and a re-release on the PlayStation 3/PlayStation Portable, via the PlayStation Classics line. Here I am, thinking it was only a fun little game on a demo disc...
Devil Dice, developed by Shift, first released in 1998.
Version played: PlayStation, 1998, via emulation.
Demo, PlayStation, 1998, via emulation and childhood memories.