Minigames in roleplaying games are hardly novel, much less a dice-based minigame in an RPG with a medieval setting. Maybe the third Kingdom Come: Deliverance game will graduate to playing cards? In any event, dice is a widely played game in 15th century Bohemia, and while your early impressions will probably be negative, at some point you’ll need to accept dice as a nigh inescapable part of Henry’s journey. This page will discuss how to even the odds by finding better dice and, with a little effort, how to win just about every game of dice you play in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2!
Page Breakdown¶
Quick Search |
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Where to Find New Dice |
Best Dice |
Holy Trinity Die / Saint Antiochus’ Die |
Favourable Die and Lucky Die |
Odd Die |
Devil’s Head Die |
Weighted Die |
Where to Find New Dice¶
Once you get past the prologue (you’ll be freed from the pillory in Troskowitz) you won’t have much to your name; Henry will have lost his dog, his horse, his armor, his clothes… just about everything save whatever he cobbled together after recovering at Bozhena’s hut. Fortunately Henry will have maintained possession of one indispensable bit of adventurer’s kit - dice. Six ordinary, standard, plain dice.
Dice for losers, in other words.
Let’s not beat around the bush, these dice are ill-suited for winning games of dice. The Dice game in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 functionally rewards you for getting multiple of the same numbers (see the page Dice Rules and Tips), and honest dice just aren’t very good at rolling three of the same number with six dice. Failing this, you’ll get 100 points for every 1 you roll and 50 points for every 5 you roll, and since most games require you to score 1,500+ points… yeah, just not winning math, there. As you’re getting thrashed by various NPCs you may notice that their dice are different colors, and the reason why is simple - they’re cheating. Different dice have different properties, inclining them to roll certain numbers, having “wild card” faces, etc. You’re not unlucky, these dice games are literally rigged against you, and they will remain so until you fight fire with fire by getting some loaded dice of your own.
(1 of 3) You can get new dice in all sorts of ways, including buying them (usually from innkeepers and barmaids),
Fortunately you can find dice in all sorts of places - they can be found in chests, urns and sacks (exploration is your friend!), looted off NPCs, including villagers, guards and bandits, bought from merchants, found in bird nests, earned as quest rewards and more. But “look everywhere and do things” isn’t a very compelling answer, so let’s just focus on the more reliable ways of getting new dice: buying or stealing them from NPCs. Killing and looting bandits is all well and good, but for obvious reasons this isn’t a practice you probably want to spread to peasants, but if you level your Thievery and Stealth skills you can spend an evening picking the pockets of sleeping characters to fish for any dice they may have. Obviously your primary target should be dice players, who tend to have a dice or two in their inventory, as should be expected, but you’d be surprised who has what dice on them if you do the rounds at night.
Buy dice from merchants when you can (especially merchants you find along the road via random encounters) and go on stealing sprees - not all dice are created equal and some are arguably not even worth fielding over the generic dice you start with. To help sort the quality playing dice from the riff-raff, we’ll discuss some of the best dice in the game, below:
Best Dice¶
To win a game of dice you need to roll multiple scoring dice in a round. This typically means straights (1, 2, 3, 4 and 5) or multiple of the same kind (three, four, five or six dice of the same number). That said, not all scoring rolls are equal, and getting a low straight (1-5) only nets you 500 points - the same amount that rolling three 5’s gets you. Three 2’s, meanwhile, only nets you 200 points, which is hardly worth the bother compared to just getting two 1’s - a much easier feat, statistically. Loading dice makes straights much less likely, and if you’re going to load anything it might as well be dice that roll 6’s or 1’s. Since 1’s are good at scoring if you get multiples and can also score on their own, they’re arguably the best value to shoot for, and wouldn’t you know it, there’s a die that does exactly that! Some dice, like the Devil’s Head Die, has a “joker” face that counts as whatever the most advantageous roll would be, and while this rarely seems to roll, it’s incredibly powerful when it does.
All in all, you shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, especially early on, as you won’t end up with a perfect collection of dice without some effort (and plenty of in-game time). That being the case, the following are what we consider to be the best dice in the game, in rough order from least best to best best.
Holy Trinity Die / Saint Antiochus’ Die¶
These dice tend to roll 3’s, which isn’t a great scoring value (three 3’s nets you 300 points, four 3’s is worth 600 points, five 3’s is 1,200 and six 3’s is worth a respectable 2,400 points). Not bad for a starter dice, and you can score some by stealing them from NPCs and you can occasionally get them from bandits or by picking herbs with the “Lucky Find” perk, but you should be keen to upgrade away before long. Unfortunately they tend to pigeon-hole you into low scoring combos, making multi-1s, 5’s and 6’s much less likely. The benefit of the Saint Antiochus Dice over the Holy Trinity Die is the former makes 2’s and 4’s less likely when not hitting on 3’s, which naturally makes 1’s, 5’s and 6’s somewhat more likely.
Favourable Die and Lucky Die¶
Another common type of die you can steal from NPCs, these dice have just a bit of extra sauce that makes them more likely to conspire with your other dice to roll something useful. Not anything specific, mind you, but they play well with others and are solid replacements for your standard dice that are fit to play with until you’re ready to roll only the best dice in the game. Lucky Dice are a bit more potent than their merely Fortunate counterparts.
Odd Die¶
5’s gives you 50 points and 1’s give you 100 points on their own. Multiple 1’s gives a boatload of points (three 1’s are worth 1,000 points!) and while multiple 5’s are worth only half the value, it’s still better than 2’s, 3’s and 4’s. If you get a junk roll, you can just score with a 1 or a 5 and reroll, fishing for something better. Both of these are odd numbers, which the Odd Die is more likely to roll, and the Odd Die is a solid pairing with just about every dice combo on this list.
(1 of 3) While perhaps not as good as Weighted Die, Devil’s Head Die are beneficial in just about every game for their ability to roll a wildcard/joker that can help fill out any burgeoning combos you may have.
Devil’s Head Die¶
A standard dice that has one face replaced with a Devil’s Head, which functions as a joker, or wild card, counting as whatever number that would benefit you the most. It’s a solid upgrade over pretty much any other dice, but keep in mind that the joker face isn’t terribly common, so this die can be a bit feast or famine - it’s either going to help you score a lot of points or it’ll be dead weight. If you want reliability you may want to stick with Lucky Die and Odd Die, but since the Devil’s Head Die’s joker face makes everything better, you’ll probably have a spot for one in your arsenal for quite a while.
You can buy a Devil’s Head Die from the travelling merchant Balthazar, and you can find one in the Pagan Burial Ground southwest of the
Lower Semine Mill (bring a shovel). You can encounter Balthazar multiple times, so it’s possible to get as many of these as you care to buy.
Weighted Die¶
These dice roll 1’s more often than normal and 1 is the best roll in the game, so this is the best dice in the game. A single roll of 1 gets you 100 points, which is… well, not much, but it’s something, and if merely one of these die rolls a 1 you can score with it and reroll the rest of the dice in an attempt to fish for something better. Three 1’s gets you 1,000 points, four 1’s are worth 2,000 points and so on - mixed with Lucky Die and Odd Die there’s a good chance you’ll be scoring 1,000 points every roll, which is good enough to beat most every other player reliably.
(1 of 2) The best collection of dice you can aspire to is a set of 6x Weighted Dice,
The best collection of dice you can aspire to is a set of 6x Weighted Dice, (left), which tend to roll 1s and hence are great at scoring points and versatile. (right)
Oddly enough, this is the first special die you’ll find in the game. When you set up camp during the prologue you can play dice with some of your companions. Enter the cave behind the dice table and you’ll find a chest you can loot for a Weighted Die, which will make it somewhat easier to win this game. If you didn’t get this die, don’t worry about it - you don’t get to keep it, but on the plus side that chest will repopulate once you’re done with the prologue. Bad news is, your old camp is now an “Enemy Camp” crawling with half a dozen bandits and the chest is now locked (easy), but when you’re capable return and loot it for another Weighted Die. Best of all, this chest repopulates its contents every few in-game days, so if you don’t mind clearing the camp repeatedly and looting the chest again, you can obtain a full playset of Weighted Die.
(1 of 4) Head to an Enemy Camp along Rocktower Pond,
Playing with six Weighted Die is frankly unfair. Gloriously unfair - you should get 1,000+ points just about every roll, and regularly 2,000+. Enough Weighted Die turns a potentially obnoxious minigame into a cake walk and a fair source of income!
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