So there is an interesting article about dice in board games up at boing boing (there doing a bunch of stuff about board games including some nice reviews at the moment).
Which I mainly agree with because I like dice in the 'roll and then use' sense - but dislike them in the choose then roll sense- which is basically what they are talking about.
But I do think it misses a trick because it does not really talk about games that use non-numerical* dice. Those times when you've still got a nice cube in our hand but they don't have a number on at all. For example roll through the ages in which the dice have a mix of pots, coins, skulls, workers, and grain on their six sides – and published in 2008 before both alien frontiers** and castle burgundy****. That's very much a roll and see what you can do with it kind of game (with re-rolls) and a chunk of ‘push your luck’ as you skirt around the disasters.
The 'hey this is new!' tone made me think about other “not just rolling the dice” mechanic I could think of, which if your me gets you back as far as 1974 with Apocalypse: The Game of Nuclear Devastation (more generally known as classic Warlord apparently) in which while you have dice you don’t roll them – you use them to secretly choose a number that the other person has to try and guess it.
Then I got thinking about how what both Alien Frontiers and Castle Burgundy are doing is using the numbers on the dice as symbols – but allowing the pre-existing relationships between those symbols to carry on existing. So while the game talks about adding or subtracting one from your dice - it just as easily could have talked about allowing you to move 1 forward or backwards around some arbitrary track. They could have easily had A through to F on the dice and it would have been the same (other then that custom dice are expensive and so if you can use a standard D6 then brilliant).
All of which led me onto thinking about the broad type of dice based mechanics I can think off.
Roll – and then do as the dice dictate (ie move that many space forwards)
Choose action – then roll (pick your thing then find out if you succeeded or failed - the first one might be a subset of this it's just your choice of actions is 1......)
Roll – then choose action (throw dice and then work out what you can do with that roll).
Pick/store a number on the dice (using a dice as a variable value counter)
Some additional things you can do with dice….
Change them (manipulation)- add, subtract or flip them over to their other side
Roll them again- throw them again
Some dice scoring mechanisms
Every dice that rolls over (or under a number)
Getting over/under an amount in total
Pairs/Tripples/Quads
Straights
Any I've missed? Any earlier examples?
EDIT - couple of good examples of other mechanisms I've missed.
Rolling for distance - as in the utterly bonkers Konig der maulwurgel (which is odd since I own a copy and introduced people to it.)
In both the new example the value on the dice is significant - so in Konig - some roles are 'invalid' and you don't get to take that move, while in blueprints the value determines what can be put on top of each other.
*Some dice have a different distribution of numbers (for example 1-3 twice) but they generally consider the numbers to be numbers – ie one better or worse than the others. Even something like the fudge dice which had + blanks and - on them are really numeric dice.....
**Side note – I was unimpressed by alien frontiers when I played it – I probably owe it a revisit as lot of people say good things about it. My problem*** was that having more dice is good, and you get more dice by getting a pair – once you’ve got a third dice then getting a 4th dice is easy. Or like me you only role a pair when some bugger with more dice has already stolen the "get more dice" spot....
***From memory – about 4 years ago – I might be totally wrong about the rules.
****Where as I love castle burgundy.*****
*****Apparently this shit is addictive – who know?
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