Dice Gambit plays in an interesting world that combines elements of the Italian Renaissance, with families feuding over a city, with modern aspects like influencers or AI. Combat is based on a mix of swords and technology, with some extremely original character classes like the movie director. You unlock these classes by gaining faction reputation with the members of the feuding families. There is a default mode, where you are likely to get classes in a certain order, but there are options to randomize that during setup, and play a game with a completely different set of classes.

You start with a single character arriving by Vespa in the city, having inherited the Inquisitor title. You discover that the city is overrun with monsters, and get into a fight immediately. Over the course of the main story you marry, "incubate" children directly into adulthood, and go on expeditions with squads out of your family members. You have a general level, but can level up every class only so much, so you have to switch classes sooner or later. The stronger any family member is, the stronger will be the spouse he/she marries, and the stronger will be the children. That gets a bit confusing sometimes, because new family members start at level 1, while often being already as strong as their relations.

Combat takes place on a hex grid, and is dice-based. You throw a number of dice based on your dice power, which you can sometimes improve by leveling. You can use the dice results for basic actions like moving, shielding up, or attacking. But you also have 4 abilities (of which 1 signature ability), that allow you to spend some combination of dice for powerful effects. By leveling you also get passive skills. Ideally that all adds up to powerful combinations, like abilities that let you throw lots of knives combined with passive skills that make damage cascade to other enemies. Every character ends up very different through the combination of classes, abilities, passives and stats he accumulates. That, and the variety of different combat scenarios, makes combat very varied and a lot of fun.

There are three acts to the main story of Dice Gambit, taking around 10 hours. But there are a lot of interesting options in the setup, where you can replay the game in a different way. And you can fast forward the story bits you already know, so replaying the same main story isn't that bad. I have already played 20 hours of Dice Gambit, and I am not finished yet. Recommended!

P.S. You can play the first act as a free demo!