IndieGo #42: Chicks in Trouble and Diceminoes

Although Chicks In Trouble and Diceminoes draw from different traditions, both find fresh possibilities by building on familiar concepts. Chicks In Trouble recalls Flicky’s feathered rescue missions, as you gather wayward hatchlings. The twist here is environmental puzzles as well as a colorful, three-dimensional farm. Meanwhile, Diceminoes turns the tabletop pastime into a score-chasing roguelike, combining dice, dominoes, and Rolling Runes to reward carefully planned connections. Whether you’re leading a flock to safety or arranging tiles for a lucrative chain reaction, both indies add enough twists to keep your next move interesting.

Chicks In Trouble, Creamative

In 1984, SEGA’s Flicky demonstrated how entertaining it could be to gather little birds and escort them past danger. Conceptually, Creamative’s Chicks In Trouble builds on that rescue routine, expanding it into a 3D farm adventure with environmental puzzles and exploration. Here, you control a father rooster tasked with finding his missing offspring and bringing them home. Like Flicky, its a clear assignment, although this time out, it’s the farm’s inhabitants and obstacles making things tricky.

Finding a chick is only a small part of your job. Reaching them can involve pushing objects, locating keys, opening routes, and working out how the surrounding scenery fits into a puzzle. Meanwhile, farmers and animals complicate your movements, with hazards such as puddles and lightning providing additional trouble. Rescued chicks can wander off, requiring you to retrieve them again. The appeal comes from blending navigation with responsibility for your vulnerable followers, since they’re too young to face the farm’s puzzles.

An exceedingly gentle difficulty curve helps ease you into your role, allowing the straightforward rescue to eventually turn into something a bit more demanding. As obstacles and puzzles require greater attention, choosing an efficient route becomes increasingly valuable. There’s a timer, so exploring every corner without a plan can mean restarting a level when the time expires. That pressure gives the adventure some urgency beneath a kid-friendly exterior. Younger players should find the objectives easy enough, but they might need some help streamlining a path, coaxing a bit of working with another person.

Chick’s cartoonish visual also convey approachability, with the cute farm becoming a colorful playground for small poultry rescue. Some good looking 3D scenery suits the lighthearted premise, with a separate cooperative campaign lets two players work together. Additionally, four mini-games offer a pleasing change of pace. Altogether, Chicks In Trouble gives a old arcade concept a welcome expansion, adding puzzles to the simple satisfaction of making sure everyone gets home safely.

Diceminoes, DeFranco Studios

As its title implies, Diceminoes take pairs of dice and joins them together into a pipped tile. Each round, you roll dice, choose which results to pair together, and place the resulting dominoes by connecting the matching ends. The goal is to build different kind of scoring patterns, that range from straights, odd and even streaks, or even mirrored arrangements. Since the board scores everything at the end of the round, you’re crafting a entire network of scoring combos rather than just finding a place for your next tile.

Like what’s happened with many traditional card, dice, and slot games, Diceminoes gets the roguelike treatment. These add upgrades and combinations that encourage different approaches across each runs. Rolling Runes are a particularly creative addition. Each has its own activation trigger and different effects assigned to its faces. When triggered, the Rune rolls to determine which effect occurs. As such, this adds another layer of chance alongside your domino placements, re-energizing a familiar tabletop pastime with a layer of different scoring combinations. And as the goal grows higher with each passing round, you’ll undoubtedly need to harness this perks.

As present, the interface doesn’t always make those scoring pursuits friendly. Rotating a domino into the intended position can be fiddly, which can mar g the otherwise straightforward process of building your layout. Predicting the final score can also be a bit difficult once overlapping patterns, multipliers, and Rune effects enter the calculation. Sure, some uncertainty belongs in a game built around rolling dice, but there’s a difference between anticipating a lucky bonus and struggling to judge whether your arrangement is strong enough. Clearer scoring information could make the planning more satisfying, while explaining the board boundaries in the tutorial would be a helpful addition.

Hopefully, handheld support receives further attention. A recent updates added native Linux support but Diceminoes still crashes when attempted to run on Steam Deck. Hopefully, this is remedied as the game has a very solid foundation. Its colorful presentation gives the number crunching a radiant personality, while the combination of domino placement and roguelike perks offers a compelling reason to keep experimenting across multiple runs.