Tamarak Trail review

What is it? A dice-based deckbuilder about murdering heavily-armed animals.
Release date February 29, 2024
Expect to pay $13.50/£12.80
Developer Yarrow Games
Publisher Versus Evil, tinyBuild
Reviewed on Asus ROG Ally
Steam Deck TBA
Link Official site

We’re living in a golden age of roguelike deckbuilders. If you like using cards to deal out death, there are loads of great games I can heartily recommend. Tamarak Trail attempts to stand out from the overcrowded pack by ditching the pack entirely, tearing up the cards and opting for dice instead. A Slay the Die-r if you will (of course you won’t, I’m so sorry). It actually makes a pretty good case for a dicey deckbuilder, though it’s sadly hamstrung by a campaign that could’ve used a reroll or two.

Armed with a pair of deadly dice, you set out on the titular trail, which is one hostile nature walk. Almost every move you make results in a fight with a monstrous animal armed with a gun. Good thing that each face of your dice has a different power to help you fight this NRA wet dream. 

Combat is turn-based, with your starter dice rolling either a basic attack, some defence, a nasty bleed effect that does persistent damage, and one that lets you evade an attack. That last power also ‘flips’ the die, letting you use whatever power was on the opposite side, too. Powers often drain from a pool of stamina, which also doubles as your last line of defence. A small amount of stamina regenerates each turn and that amount increases a little for every dice you don’t use, so there’s some tactics involved in knowing when to hold back. You can see what your opponent is going to do on their turn, so if they’re planning on shooting you, maybe not a bad idea to use a defence power.

It’s a fine, if unremarkable, combat system, similar to ones you’ll find in the seventeen deckbuilders that have been released on Steam since you started reading this review. What differentiates it is the dice. Some powers, like that aforementioned bleed one, only