Don't be fooled by "Dice Legacy," as I was. This is not a chilling city builder with a bit of quirky presentation and roguelike elements. Rather, it's a battle for survival pitting your finicky tribe against rival settlements. Instead of building a cute medieval town, you are building a machine to defeat your enemies, the Others.

One could be forgiven for thinking otherwise, given the gentle beginning of "The Dice Legacy." Park your boat on the edge of a seemingly pristine piece of land and you immediately go about your normal colony work. Food must be hunted, wood must be gathered, stone and iron must be mined by the peasant class. But here these workers are represented by stout, colorful dice.

To cultivate land, the dice rolls must be matched to various icons of the environment. Tool icons are found in forests, mines, pastures, and hunting lodges (which are already present when you arrive in the world), and to extract them, simply drop a die with the same icon over each resource. As a result, when the timer runs out, the dice are depleted and must be re-rolled before they can be used again. However, it is not known which of the six faces of the dice will be.

Early in the game, if the die rolls well, more than one face of the tool will appear, allowing the player to gather wood, food, herbs, and stones at once. But on the next roll, you might get five compass faces that can only be used for a more narrow purpose. So why not roll again for better results?

The tension at the core of the die legacy is that the die has durability. This goes down with each roll, and if it falls below zero, the player dies. You are constantly weighing the need to reroll the dice against the need to maintain durability.

But there are other dangers as well. Dice can be wounded and killed in battle. They can contract contagious plagues. They can also freeze in the winter, rendering them unusable until they heal or the season is over. Dice are rarely wiped out, which is why the game initially seemed so laid-back. Even in winter, it is not so tough if you know what you are doing.

When the cold hits, wheat fields become unusable and all dice risk freezing when used. A steam generator can be built to keep out the cold, or a mug of beer can be used to heat up frozen dice in the tavern. The good news is that the cold doesn't kill the dice outright. That would seem like too much punishment, but instead the game finds creative punishments that work well with the central dice-rolling mechanism.

Because these dice are not just for show. The Dice Legacy expands the genre to fit its singular premise. Often the results are a bit odd. For example, it's a rare city builder that requires only one house. Moreover, it is all used for, oh, procreation. Yes, putting two dice in the house - the more accurate name might be Love Hotel - results in three dice rolling out the door.

While the randomness of the dice roll cannot be completely eliminated, the faces of the dice can be "powered up" to make them more effective when they are rolled. Dice can also be fused with each other to create more powerful dice. In addition to the peasants, there are different classes of citizens, soldiers, merchants, and monks, each with a different role to play and a riot to start if they are not satisfied. The tutorial is pretty good, and there are different types of dice and buildings, so you don't have to do it if you don't want to.

All you have to do is fight the city of aggressive settlers on the other side of the ringworld. They will gradually reveal themselves as you build your city. The only way to stop their increasingly powerful assault on our buildings is to destroy their city centers to pieces.

Yeah, reaching that city is easy. Eventually you just have to expand up and up and up on a fairly compact map, but keeping the territory intact is another matter. Outposts are destroyed, dice are lost, and resources are squandered. The clever and nasty twist is that they should have been prepared for this hidden battle all along.

After two frustrating attempts at sisyphean attempts (there is no manual save, so it may be best to restart the game if you find yourself in a downward spiral), I lowered the difficulty to the easiest setting and tried again. In this case, the Others would not attack until I poked them first, giving me plenty of time to shore up my defenses and upgrade my fighters. When I finally did attack, the enemy slowly returned fire with their initial puny Raider, and we had a brief and somewhat embarrassing victory.

This is probably not the intended Dice Legacy experience, but I had to see it through to the end; there is no Others-free mode, but if you want a harder experience, you can play in an ever-wintering country, a bureaucracy-ridden country, or a map with fewer resources to procure. You can play. In addition, upon completion of the main game, alternative rulers who prefer different dice classes are unlocked.

While there is always an overlap between city builders and real-time strategy games, Dice Legacy carves out a troubling niche in the middle. It is certainly a game about building colonies, but every effort should be directed toward overcoming the cliff-like final battle. This is the engine, and the fuel is the colorful dice. Even after hunching over my keyboard and playing one of the most depressing games of my life, I admired this focus.