Management / Sim Simaris Dice Kingdom: a COYA boardgamey strategy game

[Galdred]

I first thought it would be close to King of the Dragon Pass, but it plays pretty differently:
Checks (diplomacy, battle, exploration, espiionnage ...) are made using stockpiled "dice" resources that are collected by your advisors.
So once you commit dice, these are gone for good.
The pool of events is much more limited than in KoDP, but your chance of winning the game is very low if you don't know the outcomes of the main ones, so it may be for the better.
I like the dice mechanics actually. It gives a board game feel to the game, but it also makes decisions less arbitrary.
You choose the number of dice you will roll for each check, but these will be gone forever afterwards.

Spoiler

Dice rolls can be brutal, but you can always expand fate points to reroll (these are won by choosing COYA answers that match your "alignment" at the start of the game: cunning, merciless, diplomatic, by completing some chain of events, by selling artifacts instead of using them, and by offering some dice), but these fate points are also used to purchase better councilors.


You are basically trying to survive early challenges without expanding ressources too much, in order to be able to afford better councilors (each can perform a single action per turn: either collect dice, or attempt a challenge).

Unlike a traditional COYA, you can also initiate actions:
You can target any of the other five cities, and can delay most event challenges for a few turns.

Spoiler

Most negative Steam reviews complain about the game being too hard(unwinnable even), which is a good thing in my book. Winning does require some meta knowledge, but the RNG is far from being unmanageable.

The main issue is the limited replay value, and lack of content, because once you know all the events(which should happen in 60 turns or so, among several playthroughs) and get your first win, there is not much else to do. It took me a few hours or so to get there, so I would put it in the wait for a sale category.
I played the android version, so the Steam version might differ from my experience (actually, it is quite possible the UI is till the mobile UI with a lot of drag and drop).