Strategy Tips

The is a general strategy page based on release 1.6.2. Contributors for now are asked to provide any tips from their experience that help in reaching higher floors; there is no particular organization.

* The dice to take on floors 1-5 are not much better than the starting dice. It's usually better to discard a die, upgrade, or add max hp at that stage.
* The optimal strategy is a small deck because there are no draw abilities in the game and the honey dice are usually not a bad enough dilution to ruin a small deck. A large, varied deck gives too many possibilities for a bad or unbalanced draw.
* The best early game deck to work toward is a set of dice that will show up and synergize every turn: a 5 or 6 dice deck that includes 1-2 **Attacks**, 1 **Block**, 1 **Boost**, and has enough **Hollow** to play all dice each turn, 1 **Heal** (as soon as possible replacing the glass starting heal with a *permanent* **Heal** dice), and optionally a mirror or terrain die. Attacks get priority over blocks because killing an early enemy is often easier than blocking their attack, and because in effect heal is also a defensive die (especially when past the glass stage).
* Including 1-2 heavy block, heal, or boost dice can also be good, because they cycle out of the deck for a few turns. Heavy attack dice can get in the way of turns when you don't want the attack to happen (such as trying to kill the Cockroach or keep an enemy alive so you can heal back up).
* **Grow** dice are incredibly useful to unlock and can decide long fights. **Terrain** dice are also important to unlock. **Area** dice are good but only situationally useful. **Eternal** dice come out of the deck forever but don't usually have the big numbers to make a difference. **Pierce** and **Bomb** dice are not great compared to other types and upgrades.
* Eventually you will need **Mirror** and **Terrain** dice to score the high numbers needed to survive as long as floor 41+ on Endless mode. Those floors will also require you to focus on increasing your base HP instead of further improving your deck. The basic strategy is to tank a bunch of damage while you work on setting up big terrain numbers on the board, and using them to recover with block and heal before destroying enemies with attacks.
* Although the terrain dice is great, it can hurt you in the Evil Frog fight. On average you can use terrain better than the Evil Frog does but there may be some nasty turns where he puts his attack or heal dice on your big terrain number. You can prevent this for a few turns by putting a Heavy or Eternal die on a terrain number.
* Honey dice (especially multiples for 4x or 8x) are better than Boost in the Queen Bee fight. Honeying up a Terrain dice is particularly effective.
* Always try to end fights, especially boss fights, on full HP. You may (or will always, in boss fights) then be offered a chance to increase max HP instead of healing to full HP.
* If the Wizard is displeased with you, your best option is to choose **"Right"** instead of **"Left"**. By sacrificing one die to the **Glass** modifier (which is almost always a bad modifier), the Wizard may cast **Grow** on a useful die. Conversely, if you choose to add the **Grow** modifier to any die, the higher the risk that the Wizard will cast **Glass** on a valuable die, which may ruin your run later on.
* **Boost** dice are usually most useful when they roll a 3, potentially giving +3 to two other dice. The 4 not only gives a lower total bonus but is more difficult to place. If you can be sure of playing all five dice thanks to **Hollow** then the 2 can be better with a potential total bonus of +8 spread across 4 other dice -- although the 3's bonuses are more focused. The 2 **Boost** die also combos with a **Mirror** die to give +4 each to three spaces in the middle.
* **Dual** dice with **Boost** are not as useful as with other powers -- **Boost** numbers do not benefit from "**Terrain**" dice and can get worse as they get larger, "**Boost**" being unusable at 5+ (if **Grow** is placed on a **Dual** dice).