Fans of The Witcher 3 may have fallen in love with Gwent when CD Projekt’s masterful RPG launched in 2015, but I personally lamented the loss of the original minigame from the series—Dice Poker. I always thought Gwent was too much of a commitment for a minigame contained within a 300-hour RPG, and preferred the simpler, more intuitive fun of rolling high-scoring poker hands with fistfuls of dice seen in the first two games.
While it’s unlikely we’ll ever see Dice Poker get an official spinoff in the way Gwent did, it does finally have its own dedicated roguelike. Dead Finger Dice is an Inscryption-ish mix of digital tabletop gaming and spooky narrative puzzling, with a gnarly twist where you use your character’s fingers as betting currency.
The premise is that you’ve been kidnapped and imprisoned aboard The Avarice, a luxury yacht inhabited by bloodthirsty demonic billionaires. These sadistic superrich monsters, who include Nosferatu-ish vampires and snake-headed Medusas among their ranks, force you to play games of Dice Poker, where you get five dice and four rolls to achieve the highest-scoring poker-hand you can.
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In the betting system, each player can bet multiple fingers per round, and is given a finger-guillotine for more efficient maiming. You might even call such a device handy, or perhaps anti-handy? In any case, if you can liberate a demon from all of their manual digits, you win. But if it’s you who comes up stumps, you die, and must start afresh with a new character.
In between runs, you’ll get a chance to explore your cell, where you can squirrel away useful items to bring into subsequent games, and craft new dice with “demonically sealed” special abilities. In a wonderfully grisly flourish, one of your key crafting ingredients is the fingers you’ve won from defeated demons. The more fingers you can acquire, the better the dice you can craft.
It all sounds splendidly horrible, and I’m already a fan of the game’s dithered, 1-bit art-style. There’s no release date for Dead Finger Dice right now, but curiously, it isn’t the only demon-themed virtual boardgame currently in development. Only a few weeks ago, Bioshock veterans Question announced The Killing Stone, another spooky roguelike that’s about playing a virtual tabletop game against the denizens of hell.
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