Dice Hunter

Here's a game that I played for a while about 2-3 years back, and when looking at it again to get screenshots, it has a distinct look and feel and is as enjoyable as I remembered.  Dice Hunter has you finding dice representing creatures from a range of mythologies.  Each die has a certain combination of sides, and a special power with a recharge cost.  Overall, the game has a solid design and friendly graphics.

Here is what a die looks like in the detail view:

And here is my set of six selected dice in action against a range of foes.  They drop down as you eliminate them, and falling will stun them for one round, which is a big part of the strategy.

When your dice are charged, they glow.  The number at left of center is the number of "locks" you have left.  The dice show swords (attack), shields (defense), lightning bolts (energy) and stars (stars, I guess).  Each round you can lock some number of dice by clicking them, then swipe the rest to roll them.  It provides a fun variety of outcomes.  The stars and bolts may hurt foes, stun them ot reduce their armor, as well as charging your dice.  Bolts charge dice in the first two columns and stars charge dice in the second two columns -- see the little numbers above your dice.

You match up your abilities and locks to the array of creatures that come down at you.  There are also fences, walls, avalanches and TNT that if you don't disable them they will block you, fall on you, or spawn more creatures.

The strategy of a battle has a few layers to it: knowing which dice to lock (if any), knowing what their powers do and when to charge them up, and the optimal foe to hit with a power, using their drop-stun to your advantage, and the pattern that the auto-attacks are going to take.  If you have a lot of attackers lined up against you, lock one or two shields.  If there are a few foes who are looking weak, lock a few swords to clear them out, drop-stunning the ones above them.  Try to match the star/bolt combos that damage foes, remove obstacles, or strip foes of their armor.  There are a lot of things to think about in here.  You sometimes have to pick dice of certain colors to meet a challenge, but you do want a good attack die, healing die, and some fun ones like the web spell and the witch's ability yo turn two foes into frogs.

It still feels fresh and fun, just reliving it for a while to get screenshots.

There are a fair range of activities and quests. You can search for new dice and get dice or dice shards, use dice shards and gems to power up and level up your existing dice.

Before each map level or challenge level, you get a chance to pick the dice and match the recommended strength for survival.  The choices are sometimes limited to specific colors, which can be tough if you're weak in blue like I am.

Pick your best shots ... then head into the fray and see how well you can do.

Here we go again ...

Dice Hunter gets points for being different from the main glut of apps I have seen.  It doesn't nag for money, but has all the usual packages and boosts if you want to throw some coin at the developers.  It has a good balance of cute and serious, with effective game design at every level.  Now that it's back on my tablet, I might as well enjoy it some more.