I have played almost every roguelike deckbuilder, Astrea is a solid one

I was a little worried that a dice-based deckbuilder would leave too much up to chance: that some runs lady luck would favor me and be incredibly fun, and other runs fate would frown upon me and be an horrible slog. I was delighted to find that this was not the case with Astrea.

There's a couple reasons for this. The more obvious reason is the vast breadth of dice mitigation options (ie. Rerolls, setting dice to a particular face, replacing bad faces with good ones, etc.). However, the less obvious but more impactful reason is the way that Astrea handles health. Whenever you are at certain thresholds of damage on your health bar, you will unlock the ability to use certain (usually) helpful abilities. This, combined with the fact that you can damage yourself intentionally with your "bad" dice rolls, means that rolling poorly can actually benefit you as long as you're willing to push your luck a bit. Of course, everything is still left to luck, but I felt like this feature game me enough agency to control my fate, so that it never felt unfair to me when the dice didn't go my way.

I was also very pleased with the build variety in the game. Between the 6 characters (all of whom have a large number of unique dice), gigantic dice pool, and star blessings (passive abilities), there is a huge amount of build variety. I've played for about 20 hours at this point, and I don't think I've done the same build twice yet.

Lastly, it sort of speaks for itself, so I don't think I need to say too much about, but I absolutely love the artstyle of this game. They went all in on the astrology theme and I am absolutely here for it. Bonus points for letting us play as a hammerhead shark and a moth

At first I wasn't sure about this one. Having the extra randomness of rolling dice alongside the "deck building" mechanic of randomly getting the dice themselves felt like too much RNG.

But I really flipped a 180 on this one. The problem was that I was trying to play it like Slay The Spire. But it's a totally different vibe. Unlike other games of this type, your best best is *not* to to try and narrow down your pool into a minimal viable set but instead focus on synergies between effects. Don't go so much for specific dice and just lean into stacking the odds in your favor. That's not to say you shouldn't skip dice sometimes, but it isn't a baseline tactic.

It might take a few runs to get the hang of it but I think it's well worth the effort and once you get the main ideas there is an absolutely massive amount of content here. Each unlockable character has a unique set of playstyles and skills you could choose to focus on. Even the ones I hated at first did eventually click with me.

Highly recommended for fans of dice or deck building games, just give it time and don't try to play it like StS because it's something else entirely.