How Many Dudes? Review: The Answer Is Always More Dudes

▶ TL;DRHow Many Dudes? is a very silly game built on genuinely sharp systems. The synergies are deep enough to theorycraft, the relics are wild enough to break a run open, and it plays just as well in ninety second slices on a phone as it does on a monitor. Grab the demo, then grab the game.

Butterscotch Shenanigans have been at this for over a decade, and their new one is not so much titled as it is phrased. How Many Dudes? is a question, the game is the experiment, and the answer in my longest run was one hundred and twenty one, at which point the screen was so full of little men that I could no longer find my own wizards.

It is a roguelike autobattler about recruiting an army of idiots and pointing them at increasingly unreasonable opponents. It is also the funniest game I have played this year, and the one I have quietly opened the most times while waiting for something to compile.

The pitch is a schoolyard argument with a spreadsheet bolted on

Everyone has had this argument. How many blokes would it take to beat a gorilla? What about a thousand toddlers? What about a duck the size of a horse? How Many Dudes? takes that argument completely seriously and refuses to take a single other thing seriously at all.

You run the Dude Ranch. You recruit dudes, you build a team, you send them into a ring called the Coliseum, and then you sit on your hands. This is an autobattler in the honest sense: once the bell goes, your dudes fight without you. All you get is a three second cooldown on a small set of sideline interventions, a heal here, a stun there, a bit of damage dropped on whatever is currently eating your front line. Everything that actually decides the round was decided before it started, which is exactly why the build screen is where the game lives.

Forty two dudes, six families, and a synergy hunt that keeps paying out

There are 42 dude types across six families: Undead, Employed, Warrior, Fantasy, Sci-Fi and Action. Zombie Dudes explode when something hits them. Ninja Dudes throw a barrage of shurikens. Cowboy Dudes lasso your other dudes out of trouble. Finance Dudes take out life insurance on their own teammates and get paid when those teammates die, which is the single best joke in a game made almost entirely of jokes.

The families matter because the bonuses stack by type rather than by individual, so recruiting your fourth Knight Dude is a different decision from recruiting your first. That is the hook. You are not drafting a party of heroes, you are tuning a machine, and the machine is made of guys.

Bscotch reckon there are more than 850,000 team compositions in here. I have no idea how anyone counted that, and after a long stretch of runs I have no reason to argue.

Relics are where a run stops making sense

Relics are the drop that turns a tidy team into a physics violation. Hundreds of them, and they warp the rules rather than nudge the numbers: Wizard Dudes flinging fireballs every time they move, Ninja Dudes slipping into stealth when they get low, a Curse of Doom that has a chance to copy itself onto a fresh victim every time it triggers.

Beating an act boss earns a trinket instead, and trinkets attach to a whole dude type rather than one dude. Do you give your Wizard Dudes ADHD, or your Samurai Dudes a taser? Those are the actual options, they both do real mechanical work, and the moment you commit to one the rest of the run reshapes around it.

The Promoter Dude wants a word

Between fights you get Wandering Dude events, and they are where the writing earns its keep. The Promoter Dude sidles in with the evening billing, eleven Alpha Wolfs against fourteen Porcupines, and asks whether you fancy a punt on the outcome. Win the bet, take a relic from the prize pool. Lose it, and your dudes get restored to full anyway, so he is not really the villain he thinks he is.

None of these events take longer than a few seconds to read, and that pacing is deliberate. The game never stops to explain a joke, it just hands you the next absurd decision and lets you get on with it.

It scales until the screen gives up

Round five is three little men slapping each other in an empty pale ring. Round eighty six is a roster of a hundred and one dudes and a choice between 259 Canada Gooses, 10 Panthers or 13 Stallions, priced differently because of course they are. By round a hundred and nine the arena is a churning mass of bodies and the only way to tell your team from theirs is the colour of the blood spray.

That escalation curve is the whole emotional arc of a run, and the game knows it. Watching a build you assembled from pure nonsense hold its ground against a wall of geese is a genuinely great feeling, and it lands every single time because you can see all of it happening at once.

The late rounds are why I keep restarting

There are three tiers of challenge, each with its own enemies and its own act bosses, and the top tier is where the build finally has to hold up. This is where the ghosts turn up, where the bosses start firing lasers down the length of the ring, and where a comp that cruised through the first hundred rounds gets taken apart in about eight seconds.

Then you start again, because you have just worked out what you should have done, and a fresh run is thirty seconds away.

The best argument for it is the phone in your pocket

It launched on Windows, iOS and Android on the same day, and the design has clearly been built for both ends of that. It is mouse only on PC and touch only on mobile, there is no timed input anywhere, and a run breaks into round sized chunks you can put down mid battle. The Daily Dude gives you a fixed seed to compare against everyone else, and Ensemble Mode lets you pre-select the team you want rather than praying to the recruitment screen.

On Steam it is A$20.95 with a launch discount running to A$13.61, there is a free demo sitting right next to it, and the user reviews are at 94 per cent positive across 450 of them.

Watch the trailer

Verdict

How Many Dudes? is a very silly game built on genuinely sharp systems, which is a harder combination to pull off than it looks. The synergies are deep enough to theorycraft, the relics are wild enough to break a run open, and the whole thing is packaged so you can play it in ninety second slices on a train or lose an entire evening to it on a monitor.

It costs less than lunch, it runs on everything, and the demo will tell you within ten minutes whether you are in. I was in by round twenty.