Tamarak Trail Preview – The Detective dices with death

thesixthaxis.com:

There’s been a recent influx of deckbuilding games appearing on digital gaming tables, with most of those, as expected, using cards. Tamarak Trail is different in that instead of those flat, precarious-tower-building pieces of card, it uses dice. Those dice are fully customisable, with different abilities being able to be added to each side, and they become your tools to navigate the map of Tamarak Trail which features battles, multiple choice situations, treasure chests, areas of respite, shops and despicable bosses.

In the preview build of Tamarak Trail, the character you have access to is the Detective. In the full release the roster will also include the Magician and the Tracker. The Detective is armed with a pistol for their basic attack, which has a base damage of 5, and gains a variety of abilities as you make progress. These abilities allow the Detective to inflict debuffs such as bleed and blind, as well as gain stealth. New abilities are accessed by gaining victory in battles against the different creatures that have manifested in the world, some of whom prove exceedingly tough to beat.

As mentioned, dice are the determinants of your battles, their rolls determining which abilities you will use per turn. When customising the dice it was better to have one that was geared for attack, while the other had defence abilities equipped as that way you are always guaranteed to get at least one hit in. The dice can be further customised too with dice cores. These are items that can be found in the world that add passive abilities to dice, such as making attacks slightly stronger or defence a bit more resilient.  Even though you have both dice available sometimes it is better not to roll at all, and that is because of how