In Moves of the Diamond Hand, donning the perfect disguise can be just as powerful as rolling the right dice. If you’ve played the demo, you’ve already encountered disguises. In the full game, they’re woven into the core gameplay—how you find them, keep them intact, and eventually rework them into stronger forms.
Where it happens.
It starts simple: a musician’s tuxedo, a chef’s outfit, a business suit, a unitard, a tracksuit. Each comes with its own unique dice, escalating in power as the player progresses. Every disguise ties back to the skills you’ve invested in, so your wardrobe becomes another reflection of your build. Certain disguises can only be worn when you’re powerful enough to wear them, giving you an incentive to really define who you want to be in the game.
Prototype UI of the washing system.
One feature missing from the demo, but definitely part of Early Access, is laundry. Disguises get grimy with use, and the only way to restore them is at a washing station or machine—with detergent, which is also represented by dice. When you wash a disguise, you enter a dice check where the item itself modifies the roll as “dirty laundry.” Win, and the whole costume is restored. Fail, and you can still clean up to three faces. It’s never a hard loss, just a “win big” or “win less.” Either way, the laundry always gets done.
Disguise recycling is another focus. Old disguises can be shredded for materials, but once again, the dice decide how much you recover. Win, and you salvage most of the parts. Lose, and you only get some.
Once you’ve collected enough materials—by finding them, buying them, or recycling—you can assemble more elaborate disguises using schematics hidden across the city. These schematics lay out color-and-number requirements on a dice grid, similar to building stained glass in the board game Sagrada. I’m drawn to that emergent puzzle of matching limited resources into patterns, and here it plays directly into the theme of cobbling together thematic disguises from improvised scraps.
In the end, the disguise system lets you maintain, break apart, and rebuild outfits into more powerful forms. It’s not a sprawling crafting tree, but a tight loop informed by some of the great board games I’ve played over the years—pattern matching, set collection, and dice-rolling shenanigans. The systems I’ve built around it are part of the texture of a world where a fuzzy corduroy sweater, held together with duct tape, could get you in the door when fists could not.
It calls to you...
I hope you enjoy this facet of the game!