Grimroll is a very simple game to understand, each turn you will:
Use a die to cross out the box that has the same number to defeat enemies.
Gain rewards
Repeat
Variety
In the playtest we had the basic white die and some ways to manipulate it (consumables). We needed a way to create hook mechanics and different playstyle archetypes. So, we introduced the advanced dice that did more specific things. All the advanced dice have one thing in common, they can hit any number, and they all leave a hook that another ability can latch on to.
So, not to constrain ourselves, we added 6 different types of dice 😊
Wound
Burn
Rot
Poison
Steal
Curse
Here’s a few examples
Wound Dice
The wound as an effect is a hook. It stays on the grid until triggered. Wound builds are great for placing a lot of wounds on the enemy and then triggering all of them at once for lots of rewards.
Burn Dice
All the numbers that are burning are removed, leaving a blank box at the end of your turn (that you can cross with any number) and the fire spreads to adjacent boxes.
The burn die gives us several hooks we can play around with. Burning boxes, Blanks boxes and when the burn ticks. With burn dice you can create builds that focus on removing the box numbers quickly.
Too many dice
I won’t list all the others but as you can imagine, adding all of this was quite a lot and it forced us to rethink the role of each of them. All these new mechanics made the game slower, and at times even overwhelming.
We liked the experience, but it was a stark contrast to what we had before. Turns used to flow much quicker and there was clear momentum that never forced you to brain burn and over-analyze each roll.
So, we reduced the amount of unique die types a playable character could have. To try and concentrate on just having one or two of these on top of the regular white and black die.
This solved the problem and improved the flow, figuring out one or two die combinations is a lot easier than figuring out 6 or 7.
But something was still off. Earlier in our iterations, we realized that there was one thing we unintentionally removed that also slowed down the game considerably.
If you want to know what it was, join our Discord and follow and wishlist the game to be notified of our next dev blog.