Dice Throne Digital will launch with a Slay the Spire-inspired roguelite mode

The hit board game brings big new ideas for its video game adaptation

Dice Throne Digital, an upcoming video game adaptation of the popular Dice Throne board game series, will get a surprising single-player mode when it launches. Polygon can exclusively reveal that the game will feature a roguelite mode inspired by Slay the Spire alongside a traditional competitive mode.

Dice Throne is a deckbuilding board game that combines Magic: The Gathering and Yahtzee. Players choose a hero, who has a set of attacks that are activated by rolling dice. It has since received several expansions, including a Marvel crossover and the single-player-friendly Dice Throne Adventures. In February, developer Nerd Ninjas announced that it was working on a digital version of the game, which is targeting PC and Meta Quest, alongside Android and iOS devices. In an interview with Polygon, Dice Throne co-creator Nate Chatellier revealed more details about how the game will work, sharing new information about its campaign mode and monetization strategy.

Dice Throne Digital will launch with two components. The first is a PvP mode, which faithfully adapts the board game into a faster-paced form. Rounds are expected to take somewhere between five and 10 minutes and draw inspiration from games like Hearthstone in terms of pacing. Players will be able to choose from eight characters, all pulled from the board game’s first season.

Campaign Mode, on the other hand, is a single-player roguelite. In it, players take a hero out on a four-act run. Each act has players choosing shorter minion battles along a path of options, grabbing upgrades, and eventually facing an area boss. If that sounds a bit like another popular deckbuilding video game, you’re spot on.

“Slay the Spire, when I first played it, had a big impact on me,” Chatellier told Polygon. “I really like that game a lot, so the idea of bringing Dice Throne and Dice Throne Adventures with Slay the Spire into a roguelite digital version just felt natural and right.”

In terms of pace, Chatellier estimates that the average battle in the campaign will take under five minutes to complete, while a full run can last between two and four hours. Players will be able to quit out of runs at any point and save their progress. The campaign will also feature some familiar bosses from Dice Throne Adventures, like the Mad King.

For the team at Nerd Ninjas, who worked on last year’s sleeper gem Battle Train, the goal is to create a digital adaptation that faithfully captures the spirit of the board game, even in its new modes. Chatellier acknowledged that digital board game adaptations aren’t always great, so he’s approaching the project with a high standard in mind.

“It’s not that a lot of board games don’t port well; it’s that they aren’t ported well,” Chatellier said. “There’s a reason for that. The cost to port something at a high-quality bar is very expensive. When you think about board games by definition, they are premium games. For mobile especially, it’s almost a death wish to do that. Even on Steam, the price is racing down to the bottom very quickly.”

Part of his initial anxiety over porting Dice Throne was around making sure the team’s approach to monetization was fair. Dice Throne Digital will launch as a freemium game that can be played without spending a dime. Players will only get one hero to start, but they’ll be able to unlock more using Hero Tokens, an in-game currency. (There’s an additional premium currency called Crowns, which players can also earn by playing.) Alternatively, players can choose to buy heroes outright, as well as cosmetics.

There are good reasons that Chatellier is thinking so carefully about how to adapt Dice Throne into a video game. The first is that the series’ fans are eager for it. An internal community survey conducted before the project was revealed showed that an overwhelming majority of players wanted to see the game adapted, with the top requests being for Steam and mobile versions. But it’s also important to Chatellier because the board game was originally conceived as a video game inspired by looter-shooters.

“I was playing Borderlands or Borderlands 2 at the time,” Chatellier said. “I love the idea of all kinds of loot — some of it is good, some it’s not. The original game was called Dice Forge. Kind of like a Final Fantasy, you’d assemble your team. And then you’d forge dice that would help activate that character. You’d go down in these dungeons, you’d loot all these dice faces, you’d craft cores, you’d build these dice, you’d be rolling them as fast as you could. I still, to this day, think it would be a very fun game.”

Chatellier was initially working on the project after getting laid off, but he pivoted to a board game overnight after receiving a tough reality check. He recalled the story of talking to a Valve employee at a Dota tournament, a conversation that ended in him driving home and spending a sleepless night figuring out how to readapt Dice Forge into a board game.

“I was there and was talking to some of the Valve employees, and I was telling them I got laid off, I’m making this game, here’s a prototype,” Chatellier said. “I had it ready, intentionally to show some Valve employees. One of them said, ‘This is really good, it has a lot of potential. But let me tell you a little story about when I tried to start my own video game studio. There were three of us, we spent two years, we lost a lot of money. We have 100 App Store reviews. They’re all five stars. And we lost a ton of money. It’s not about making a good game; it’s about making a good game that gets discovered.’”

Nearly a decade later, Chatellier is confident that it’s the right time to finally bring his vision full circle. Dice Throne has built a dedicated community during its lifespan, who have helped the series raise millions of dollars on Kickstarter. (A Kickstarter for Dice Throne Digital will begin in April, and it already has over 17,000 followers.) It’s still as much of a creative risk as it was when a Steam employee shot it down, but Chatellier is no stranger to taking those throughout Dice Throne’s history. He previously called his shot with the game’s Marvel collaboration, something he had dreamed up on a wishlist well before any partnership happened.

“I feel like if I don’t ever get someone to laugh at me for something I’m dreaming about, then I’m not dreaming big enough,” Chatellier said.