Question for dice game idea

Actually there are a selection of games use dice as things besides "dice". My friends and family commonly use dice for life counters for Magic the Gathering and I know the Star Wars card game uses dice as counters as well.

Dice are perfect to keep track of low numbers, or even high ones if you feel like you can easily explain how to do it. For example, for life totals in MTG, I have a huge D6 and two small same-colored D6 - the big one is my TENS and the smaller ones are my ONES, so if the big die is 2 and little ones total 9, I have 29 life. I will redo my Space Mines game at some point and more easily insert the dice-as-counters concept into it.

The numbers instead of pips are ok and I have seen Dragon Dice but dont remember them - I'm partial to pips myself and I think D6 are the perfect size to use for counters. I think dice are fine to represent pieces or units or what have you, though a lot of people don't like the genericness of it.

Sounds like if done right it would be cool. The cost could be a poblem, but if you use six sided die, just get the blank ones and use stickers. I'm sure you've thought about that though. Hmmm...... to only have your own plastics factory... ^_^

If you dont have any reason to roll these dice, why would you not consider using just a plastic or wooden cube?

If you dont specifically need a die, it might be cheaper to just use a cube of plastic or wood, since it would not need to be sent through any type of die certification/validity testing (you know the whole process involved in validating the dice are weighted correctly). A big part of the cost of dice comes from this extra processing to assure your dice are valid.

Something I've been toying around with involves using dice as cheap counters. The game involves three different "currencies" (for lack of a better term). Each currency does a slightly different thing in the game (how it relates to point totals). Each currency is represented by a different color of die (red/white/green, for example).

Each player is assigned a number 1 through 6. When a player plays his currency on to the board, he places the die on the board with his number face up to indicate that it is his.

This simplifies things greatly, so instead of having to have 3 different token sets for each player, I now have 3 different token sets that can be used by all players. So, if players are pulling tokens randomly from a bag, any token can be used by anyone. If players are willing to make deals for X amount of red tokens, then fine, just hand over the red dice. Or if players want to make a deal for different ownership of a token on the board, you don't have to swap them out; you just flip the die around to appropriate player.

Of course, in the real world dream, each die face would have a special symbol for each player, and not just die pips. But for cheap, available items, dice are a great way to go in this application.

packs of dice from WALMART or your toy aisle in the Grocery Store... usually 99 cents - $1.99 for a set of 5.
I've seen packs of 10 dice at the Dollar Store (or the Dollar Tree, whatever you call it) for, drum roll please.... one dollar! (I bought theire entire stock, LOL.)

First, I have to say that I somewhat hated dragon dice. The first flaw in the material was the shapes carved on the dice which were very hard to understand. You need an instruction book that showed you which faces are available on each die. Second, the fact that it was a collectible game was also horrible. I bought 1 starter set pack and it is now taking dust somewhere in my house.

Now, there is another dice game which look cool that I have seen in YuGiOh called DDD which stand for something like dungeon dragon dice. OK, it's yugioh, it's fiction, still there is a few cool ideas. Here is the rules explained really fast.

3 Dices are drawn, they have stars, pentagram, swords, etc. All result goes into a crest pool. If you get a number of star, you can summon one of the die rolled. The summon die is place on the table. It open itself making 6 tiles on the board with a creature in it. You can move the creature around the tiles.

The goal is to reach the opposing player, You cannot summon dice where there are already tiles. Some creature has special abilities that requires some rolled crest to activate. You can use your reserve crest in your crest pool. So you can use you pentagon crest to cast spell, or sword crest to attack. As you can see, there is a lot of fiction but there is still a couple of good ideas.

By the way, one of the thing I love in YuGiOh is all the game found in the manga besides the basic card game. They are really interesting and sometimes give me ideas.

Finally, I already tried to make home made symbol dice. I don't think my solution can be used for commercial purpose. I use D6 blank dices that you normally use stickers on them. I take a permanent fine marker and draw my logo on them. When they are dry, I use some varnish on them to make sure the logo does not fade with time.

Varnish!

Maybe it's be who did not use a correct english word, but I checked it in my english dictionary and it goes as follow:

"A liquid preparation that is spread on a surface and dry into a hard glossy coating."

There is mate and glossy varnish. You can use varnish used for finishing miniature painting or you can also use floor varnish, it works also. I already try to use floor varnish on my miniature and it worked perfectly.

For the dices, I use some kind of white flat dice that looked like ceramic. They are generally use as replacement dices for games like the ones made by gameworkshop. You need to stick stickers on them. But you can use a permanent maker and draw your icons on them. Still, when you roll the dices a large number of times, the logo will fade away. So you can paint them with varnish to make sure the ink does not fade away. The dice will become a bit stiky but it is not that bad.

You can buy a clear spray varnish, like Krylon Clear Coat. It protects them from wear and tear wonderfully, and no, it doesn't make them sticky, it makes them smooth and somewhat shiny.