Dice Tavern: Farkle Roguelike Steam Demo Review
Verdict: Maybe
Farkle turned into a roguelike where you weight dice, swap faces, and push a target score up a ladder of taverns. The lo
Dice Tavern: Farkle Roguelike had me sitting in the first tavern scoring nothing, because I skipped the tutorial thinking I was clever and started playing dice poker instead. Farkle is not poker. Once I sorted that out I got about an hour in, cleared the village tavern, got stuck on the boss of the next one, and had enough of the loop to know what I like about it and enough of the presentation to know what pulled it down.
My verdict is a Maybe. About an hour in I had cleared the village tavern, got stuck on the boss of the next one, and understood the shape of the run. Closer to Balatro's synergy chase than to a standard dice roguelike. The dice mods, the score-fewer-dice trick, and the push-vs-bank rhythm all worked for me, and I like where the build layer is going. What kept it off a Play is the look and the feedback: they do not do enough of the work a maths-heavy loop needs the rest of the game to do. Demo is on the main Steam page now; full game planned for Q3 2026.
Pros
- Bank vs Score & Reroll turns every roll into a real decision, and the farkle penalty makes the push mean something
- Weights, face removals, and the six-active-slot pool give the between-match build a lot of texture
- Multipliers reward scoring fewer dice than you could, and figuring that out is the moment the demo opens up
Cons
- The presentation is doing too little for a maths-first loop: the medieval-plus-funky-futuristic theming does not cohere, and the scoring feedback is thin enough that if the dice build does not hook you on its own, there is not much else to keep you at the table
Learning Farkle
I came in expecting dice poker and sat there wondering why my rolls were worth almost nothing. Farkle is a classic dice Board Game that shares a bit of DNA with poker, but the scoring is not the same. You still get points for a three of a kind or a straight, but beyond that the real scoring is single 1s and single 5s, and those two faces do most of the work early on.
Once I stopped thinking in pairs and full houses and started thinking in 1s and 5s, the rolls started paying out.
The Core Loop
Every turn you roll six dice, pick which ones you want to score, and lock those to the side. Then you decide: bank the turn's score for the round, or hit Score and Reroll and try to add more with the dice you have not locked. If that next roll gives you nothing that scores, you have farkled, and the turn's banked points go with it. You only get a set number of rounds to hit the target, so the push-your-luck rhythm is the whole game underneath the Roguelike shell.
The multipliers add a layer on top of that. One badge doubled my score when two of my scoring dice were showing different faces. Once that was in play, scoring all of my valid dice was often worse than scoring some of them. Sitting there thinking about whether to take the two 5s and roll again, or lock a single 5 with the multiplier in mind, is where the synergies started to show. Chasing bigger scores like this is the Score Attack side of it.
The Shop and Dice Building
Rounds pay out gold, and gold goes into the shop between matches. This is where the Strategy layer sits. One shop die makes 1s and 5s more likely to roll. Another removes numbers from a die entirely, so you can strip out the faces that never score for you. You can also weight one face of a die so it comes up more often.
You can only have six dice active at a time, so building your set is as much about swapping worse dice out as it is buying new ones. The Deck Builder shape here is dice, not cards, and it is the layer I spent most of my session thinking about.
Progression and Presentation
You move up a Roguelike ladder of taverns, from farmers and shepherds in the village to something more city-flavoured on the next floor. Higher targets, fewer rounds in some matches, and specials on the opponents. A normal farkle only costs you the turn's banked points. Some opponents twist that, and one of the boss variants took a chunk of my total score every time I farkled, not just the turn. The opponent rules were where the real change mattered, not the flavour text.
The theming is trying to go medieval tavern, but with a funky futuristic vibe on top that I could not place. The visuals do not look very good, and the feedback around scoring and rolling is not doing enough. Dice games where you are chasing higher and higher scores are already pretty low-dopamine, because you spend most of a turn doing sums in your head. Everything else in the presentation is what has to keep you sitting down, and this demo is not there yet.
Developer: Cavi Studio / HARRISONWORLD CO.,LTD
View on Steam
Tags: Indie, Strategy, Roguelike, Board Game, Deck Builder, Score Attack
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