This is a bare bones guide on some general strategies that must be employed to consistently win in normal and have a better shot at winning hard without resetting constantly or seed fishing. I believe in trying to win every run given to you, resetting for a better seed or start isnt challenging you to the mechanics of the game.

I do not claim to be a super duper expert, but all I do is play mostly roguelikes like this and general concepts in these games all carry over from each game.

I have finished every character on normal and hard and now working on extreme.

I will go over those concepts as this game is much simpler than most roguelikes and is a very good environment to learn and master these ideas.

This game has a huge crux on economics. Being able to buy items is incredibly strong, there is a reason why the companion abilities that can create items or make gold are more rare and more expensive to activate. I will explain some basics and go into depths for every topic I cover here.

Economics is an important part of this game to really grasp and you must evaluate each shop between a cost and loss perspective.

There are only two ways to get power in this game. Dice and Shops. Companions provide the means to get more dice and shops but generally are a huge consumer of dice. Our goal is to stall as much as possible to get as much dice and gold as possible as those are the ONLY ways to get stronger in this game. This isnt like slay the spire where you can manipulate your dice pool, there isnt any RNG control in this game, you can easily lose games to monsters that require a 5 and you simply dont roll one in 3 rolls. Therefore we cannot rely on luck as the only way to beat luck is to have way more resources. We have to stall.

By far the most powerful relic in this game is the divine branch which gives you a rare companion.
A companion is a reward you do not get until youve survived a few rounds and their powers can be permanent. Getting to have one at the start of the game means you can snowball far more effectively. You also get a large amount of extra health as your companion can be a meat shield for the first couple of rounds saving you health. Very often I win runs starting with an item creator, and just having it die before first companion reward and just replacing it. This gave me +10-15 more life which is way better than those relics that give +more life for instances.

I am against restarting the game to fish for a good start but that is absolutely the best strategy with divine branch. Finding a companion that you can activate and abuse from the start can snowball your run almost immediately.

In order of importance at the start of the game. Also note depending on your hero power, certain companions can be way better, for instances King + Blacksmith starting out is an insane value engine.

Any companion that makes money.
Any companion that heals.
Seer.
Any companion that makes items.

Why? Because our goal is to snowball our resources at the start when the enemies are easy to handle and do not threaten us extremely. Your first floor is random but the best monster to fight at the start of the game is a 1 damage Vulture or 1 damage raven.



So for every floor we are looking to stall as much as possible spending the least amount of life every roll. This means killing every mob except 1. Keeping the dice we need to kill them whenever we want, reducing their attack to as low as possible, and hoard dice to activate our companion who either gives us money or life as much as possible before the dungeon master comes.

This is because when we can stall we start using our health as a resource. And we start with full and at least 15 depending on your hero. Heros that have armor can stall better too but I'll talk about armor later.

Think about your resources.

You start off with a huge amount of life, another companion, and 3 dice slots in your bag. The enemy needs 1 die to be killed and does 1-3 damage (depending on what mob you get).

There is a reason also why the game has a limit on turns. The dungeon master shows up after a set number of dice rolls and its vital we use up every roll before he comes. This means we get the most dice every floor to activate our companions as much as possible and complete the gold set requirement so we have the most money possible to buy money making items in the first shop.

This is why the orange dice is the most important dice in the game. It lets you utilize the most important resource that you have, that you have a ton of at the start of the game with and use it to your best advantage. Your life pool. Stalling for 5 rolls a floor to get enough dice to make gold and not dropping too low is key. The goal is to make a ton of money, then switch to a healing companion after the 2nd or 3rd companion offering and proceed to make infinite life because we've bought out the shop.

So to summarize

Divine branch for a rare companion. Make gold early by stalling and using orange die to reduce damage so we can stall more. Use those stalled turns to hoard dice and finish our gold set every floor to make money to buy items that make us more money in the early game. This leads to a much stronger position to fight the later floors and eventually the boss.

For heroes who do not have a trinket slot, the relics that make items cheaper are huge value or picking the relic that best synergies with your hero, either covering for a spot they are bad at, or making their already good spots even better so you can focus on that.

Most of the companions are kinda bad.

The companions that mess with the opponents dice are pretty bad or even only once per turn.

Advisor, Princess, Fishermen, Monk, and Spy are all pretty bad and give us no snowball in economy or power.

Healers
There are two consistent healers, Bard and Healer and they are both top tier for different reasons.



Bard lets you stall through levels while maintaining health and growing our health resources but is very finicky to activate, if you have a good hero power like King, Paladin, Executioner, Jack, then she very easy to consistently activate every round to amass life and keep the enemy from attacking.



The healer is the end game healer. If she is offered after level 15 and we have a consistent money engine, then we can make tons of life by stalling and be ready to have as many items and turns as possible to kill the boss.

Money Makers
Money Making companions are very varied.
The most consistent ones are Peasant and Beggar.

Treasurer is good if you get Ant Pendent and some sort of +Dice thrown. Otherwise the artifact that activates your companions skill every 3 dice rolls is incredibly powerful when we are stalling.

The Seer



Seer deserves its own section because it is incredibly powerful but it requires a floor to activate to get going.

Using the seer completes a dice slot of a monster in the NEXT floor. It however STACKS. If you use the Seers power 4 times this floor, next floor 4 random dice slots will be completed automatically.

This is incredibly powerful as the activation for it is only 2 odd dice. This lets us begin stalling next round almost immediately as we wont need to spend dice killing monsters at the start since most monsters get nuked immediately. On average it takes 3-4 dice rolls to kill a monster. Seer makes it a definite 2 per slot to kill a monster so you win out on averages. It also instant kills big creatures that have only 1 dice slot.

However, we have to have a reason why we are stalling. Making money with the dice set is not enough with the seer alone. We should have tons of artifacts or money making items or our hero power is worth spamming if we are going to seer. Seer is also a dead draw before the boss and useless against the boss of the final floor. She is best used after floor 15 for maybe 5-7 floors as youll be throwing enough dice to proc her a lot and do your other business but not weak and late enough to mean anything.

Item Makers
Some of the most expensive companions in the game.

Shopkeeper, Cook, and Artist are all really good companions for stalling with. Being able to produce an item every turn means you are netting at least 1 gold with every activation if its just cook, or at least 2 with Artist since she paints a rare item. The Shopkeeper requires timing so you can use her when you have less than 5 silver to maximize her value.

Again we are stalling to activate our dice set and use our hero as much as possible.

Remember if we stall we activate all the items we have as much as possible. If we are spending dice on our companions instead of killing mobs, we proc items that activate on skill use more often for instances. We are going for snowball and its vital we make use of every dice as efficiently as possible.

The Seducer is a very good companion if we get items or have a hero power worth stalling. Having dice set completion is also nice too for the gold every turn.

However Orange dice are incredibly powerful and they are always worth saving if we do not need them.

Having 3 or 4 orange dice for the boss can effectively render most bosses to pitiful 1 damage attacking bosses every turn and give you all the time you need to maximize value.

This is why we stall, to roll as much dice as possible and pick the best dice to carry with us so we are in an even better position to stall and roll more rice the next floor.

We are looking for several items specifically. In order of importance:

Anything that heals or triggers when we use skills.
Anything that nets us silver or gold passively.
Any item that has After X rolls.

Items that give us bonus dice rolls are incredibly rare and inefficient sometimes so they are worth only if you have an abundance of gold already.

These items are core to surviving, having multiplies of these lets you consistently power through.

- When your companion is hit, you are healed. (Heart shaped Box)*
- Every stage start you heal. (Strawberries)
- When you use a skill your companion is healed. (Blue Medal)
- Every X rolls your companions skill is made available. (Shapeless Key)
- (Sage's Tea)
- (Exile's Fan)
- (Battle Axe)
- (Pickpocket's Fake Stone) is an absolute house in stalling strategies at making money.
-(Rusty Locket)

Nice to have items that help us along.

Anything that boosts the increase of colored dice. Specifically Blue and Orange. Health dice are not as important as there are plenty of items that let us hoard health if we are stalling correctly.

Items we start buying once we are making at least 2-4 gold a stage.

Hammers, Garlic, and Increasing our dice value are decent options if we have rerolled the shop too much. I recommend not rerolling the shop when it costs more than 40% of the total gold you have.

Items to be wary of but can be instant winners:

Gambler's Purse
Insane item. Synergies with a lot of other items because becoming more powerful in this game means getting more dice rolls. You setup scenarios where you have the dice you need to kill the last monster and theyve been reduced to low damage (1 or 2). Then you can roll dice until the dungeon master comes and turn every unused dice into silver. Later in games every turn can get you 1-2 gold.

Trader's Manual
Synergies with our strategy immensely. The goal is to hoard gold, dice, and items. This does all 3 by giving us way more gold than any item can and helps snowball immensely.

Crystal Tooth
The crystal tooth gives us a lot extra dice on each roll at the expense of enemies no longer dropping coins. This is only a problem when we do not have a money engine setup. You can also use this as a means to get your engine started. If you have a value producing companion like shopkeeper then Crystal Tooth is an absolute house of value even though youll have 0 gold for most of the first 20 stages. But once the shopkeeper produces enough items and you find something in the shop like Gambler's Purse, or Trader's Manual, then you can easily win the game from any position.

Ronin's Headband.
If you get healer as your rare companion start of the floor, and you get this offered in the first shop, It is very likely an immediate take. The value of 12 gold before 2nd shop far exceeds any value we can place on anything else. If we have Bard too it is probably an instant pick. Having 12 gold that early means we can enter our 2nd shop with nearly 20 gold if we are stalling our dice set out and can buy out all the healing and money making items we need to get our engine going as fast as possible to snowball out of control. All we gotta do is keep our healer alive until we can activate them every roll freely. (Was nerfed to 10, still worth it.)

Suspicious Potion.
Is absolutely broken. Passive income of half a gold every floor is often about 50% of the silver you would get from monsters already at the expense of 3 extra value on monsters with dice value. This is hardly anything if we are stalling and spewing dice and activating our companions every roll.

Emperor's Egg
Insanely good early on before we can stall really well. Cuts out our stalling turns required when we have only 2 or 3 dice a turn.

Gate Keepers Obol
This is usually a lot of free money. We usually buy 2-3 items each shop. Often times this item nets me 10+ gold. Probably needs to be deleted from the game honestly as its the biggest snowball item in the game for the most important and consistent strategy in the game.

Goblins Purse
Very powerful item and often very cheap. There is a reason why there is a whole trinket slot item that is a duplicate of this items ability. Changing silver requirements for making a gold is an incredibly high value on returns especially if you get more than 1.

* - Special note about heart shaped box. If you manage to get 2 or more of these things, you can easily win the game by keeping your companion alive as your life skyrockets into the 100's.
Stalling and reducing damage of enemies to 1 or 2 or even 3 damage can net you + 4-5 health for being hit. Then every red dice rolled is used to heal your companion. For instances here is my first Hard Executioner run where I had 3 heart shaped boxes, I bought the Frozen Tooth (+2 dice and no more silver drops) but the run was won for sure around round 13 when I got my 3rd heart shaped box. It was easy to stall for a very long time to rack up hp on my hero and every floor Seer auto killed nearly every monster on the floor and the 3 dice I saved from prior round always was enough for me to leave the lowest damage monster alive for me to farm up more seer skill uses and more orange dice.



You can see saving the orange dice allowed me to reduce the main hydra boss's attacks to 1 and from there on out, the hydras could literally not kill me anymore as everytime they hit my seer for 1 or 2 damage, i was healed for 6 life.

Items to flat out ignore in the shop
Healing items that just heal companion or hero for X on buy and that is it, are pure desperation and/or usually grabbed if youre flush with cash. They do not do much and their gold costs are really not worth the value 99% of the time.

Cloak, Tonic of the Pact, Reaper's Contract, the Forlorn Set, Orb of Overkill, Conjurer's Contract, Virtuoso's Cookbook, Shield of Revenge, Heart in a Jar, Bounty Poster and Twinblade are more often than not absolutely piss poor value for your gold. They will either rarely give value and actually do what they do, or are too difficult to activate for the trouble.

Armor is downgrade on heals. There are some characters where its nearly impossible if not actually impossible to roll red dice and instead they roll armor dice. All this does is downgrade the value of those dice and make it so you have to be extra cautious about how you use them.

Armor is only really good for two scenarios.

Monsters that deal damage to you when they die

And when you have taunt, that is all monster attacks go to you.

Because there isnt an attack indicator in this game, you do not know where the monster will attack next, could be you or your companion. Chances are your armor could be wasted when that die could have been used way more efficiently.

Obsidian Plate (Double armor gain), Paladin's Prayerbook (heal equal to shield at end of stage), and other armor related items are mostly a waste. The only one is the shield and at 4 gold it is often way to pricey for how often it procs.

LASTLY MOST IMPORTANT THING TO REMEMBER:

This is a roguelike, you wont get everything you want and you wont get to implement the strategy you want exactly. You must be able to recognize what is good for you at this point of the game and this guide is only meant to help you see the value in things you might not realize. But start with the question:

"Is it worth clicking the roll button again?"

For instances my first hard mode game of King, I got blacksmith as companion from divine branch and I spammed him hard every turn. I wasnt getting any healing however and blacksmith hitting me for 2 every turn was starting to hurt. I was also not given any of the healing items that happen on dice roll or skill use so I had to conserve. I instead was given multiple copies of Goblin Dice bag which reduced the silver cost to convert to gold by 1. I had 4, so I only needed 6 silver to make a gold. I then bought the items that made silver more often and was able to buy out shops every time to stay alive by buying items that gave me +healing dice chance, and buying things like drumstick or hungry bags to heal. I saw Ant necklace which made all my starter rolls 6s. I then saw the item that folds a random enemy when you roll triples of something. I was able to then turn 1 regularly kill 3 out of 4 mobs and reduce my damage taken by huge amounts and also stall far more. Once I was able to stall again, the game was easy to win when I can have all the resources I wanted.