This is an idea I have been kicking around for a few weeks and I'd like to get some feedback.
I'm imagining a game where players must race for treasure using a treasure map. There would be many short rounds of treasure hunting and the goal is to get the most treasure. If the game came with a deck of treasure map cards, eventually the players would learn the location of the treasure on each map and the game would lose most of its play value. So I thought of a way to make a randomizable treasure map.
My idea was to use something exactly like Boggle (Big Boggle to be exact, for a 5x5 grid). The only difference is that the dice show terrain features instead of letters. One die would be marked with an X on all sides. When you shake up and settle all of the dice, you end up with a simple map with a treasure location somewhere on it. The next step would involve route planning, action point spending, or any other method of racing to the treasure's location.
Using a map generator like this, you could also develop a game about cultivating the land or building an empire. It could be used to create an overworld in a dungeon crawl. I imagine it could also be used to create a neat puzzle game where you have to fix the layout of the grid using only a limited number of moves. There are a lot of applications, but right now I'm trying to work on the treasure hunting game.
The main reason I came up with this idea is to find an alternative to tiles. It's a gimmick. Who want's to play another tile-laying game? That's been done to death.
About the treasure hunting module: to ensure you'd always get a treasure chest on the map, one die would have nothing on it but treasure chests on all sides. The rest of the dice would have terrain types in varying frequencies. So where ever that treasure die landed, that's where the treasure is. You can't accidentally get no treasure or multiple treasure (unless you arrange the initial dice mix). The question becomes, where will it land, and what terrain will surround it?
As far as producing such a thing, I agree full color dice would look the best. There is one game I know of that has done four process color printing on dice, and that's The Simpsons Liar's Dice game. I am sure it was an expensive process. Using stickers as an alternative is generally a bad idea because they would have a higher than average chance of wearing off or becoming damaged by the edges of the grid. One work around for that would be to use indented dice. Another idea would be to use dice with different solid color faces. Blue for water, green for forest, etc. But all of these production questions are way ahead of the real issue: is it going to be playable?
I've begun writing up some game ideas using this thing. If I can come up with a compelling and fun use for it, then I'd pursue developing those games further. I'm interested in hearing about any ideas you can come up with for this kind of component.