We’ve seen tons of balatro-inspired games surface recently in the wake of the game’s massive success. For the most part they all offer a decent amount of the same type of fun, but always tend to miss the sweet spots that balatro was able to hit. The same is true for Dice of Kalma. It’s a good little time killer, has some neat “joker” interactions and synergies to experiment with, but ultimately doesn’t really go further than being a decently fun time killer. Winning your first few runs is tough enough, and requires enough strategizing to make for a compelling time, but after that it feels far too tediously repetitive. It’s lacking the other balatro-like features that really added depth to the experience. You can upgrade the different hands (pair, 2 pair, etc.) but nothing else. And once you’ve gotten a handle on what skulls (jokers) are good the difficulty cieling drops significantly. Despite this the game gets an easy recommendation from me to anyone who enjoys roguelikes generally. It’s cheap enough to be worth the time, has a dedicated development who frequently updates, and it’s great to encourage/support more games off this nature/monetization style in the iOS store. Opposed to recent games like Heroll or Dicero, whose every aspect and feature aims to trick you into spending untold amounts on micro-transactions, games like this deserve some love even if they aren’t up to par with the greats of the genre.

Yea ok I’m not really one for an iPhone game. I don’t like them mostly, and it’s real hard to get a good one; examples include doodle jump, tree ninja, etc… but this game? This game… It’s fun, not too long, great at filling the time and low stakes for how high stakes it is. It’s a little luck, a little strategy and a whoooole lot of excitement when you hit big. It’s beatable (I just proved that to my self in the last run because I wasn’t sure) but totally worth the time it takes to figure it out. My compliments to the chef, this is one that will go down in the books for me. Well done and to any new players… good luck. 💀

It’s pretty fun to play a few times until you beat level 25, but the game would be so much better if you could modify the dice in some way. Every single skull has a conditional to meet, and right now the game is built around manipulating the dice to activate as many as possible, but it would be far more interesting to be able to manipulate the odds outside of battle to strategically help activate certain conditionals and avoid certain rolls. Perhaps whenever you win a battle/skip a skull (would have to be implemented), you could gain currency, then spend it at some kind of shop to change the numbers on dice/fully replace dice with new custom dice. I just don’t understand how we took Balatro, then completely removed the tarot card system, remaining card system, and purchasing card system that helped make gameplay so interesting and simply replaced them with more discards/rerolls. If different dice had different odds to roll certain numbers, gameplay would involve so many more decisions, both in and out of combat. The lack of customization in that regard completely shocked me, as it’s such an obvious staple of the genre, and for good reason. As aside, I must say that hand leveling is handled really weirdly. Why do they all scale equally by +5 chips and +1 mult? In terms of a percentage increase, that’s way more impactful for the “weaker” hands, and since skulls are basically all your points anyways, you’re incentivized to go for “weaker” hands to activate more skulls. Hands should scale proportionately to their base values.

Overall, I enjoy the gameplay but dislike a couple of mechanics and ability to play offline. From a gameplay perspective, I like the poker dice gameplay loop, and the points per round are reasonable. There are no permanent upgrades to make future runs easier, so it is truly a roguelike vs a roguelite. A big negative is how the skull modifiers are handled. For example, the skull modifiers are things like “+5 Bones and +2 Multi When playing a hand if at least one dice is equal to the sum of its two adjacent dice.” That’s one of the easier ones, but you have to remember up to 24 of those depending on where you’re at in the run. I find myself spending more time scrolling the skulls list after a few rounds. You can also get the same skull but in different colors. No idea what the colors mean, and I’ve yet to see it explained in-game.The most egregious problem is that the game just completely locks up my phone if I lose connectivity. I was playing the game on a roadtrip, and it crashed so hard in low connectivity situations that my iPhone 16 Pro restarted itself. Twice. I’ve even paid for the ad unlock, so there is no excuse for this behavior. Without ads, everything should be client-side, but it is clear there is something server-side when completing a round that isn’t handled gracefully. It really soured me on the game.