Top 10 Games that Use Dice in Cool Ways 

I fully support Wendy's Pass the Pigs selection. The pigs are a shaped randomization item where each way a pig lands means something else. Sounds like dice to me. Official definitions seem to only acknowledge six sided dice with pips, so that is not helpful.

Love the Dice Tower and their growing slate of presenters. It would be great to have more crossovers between the two teams. I miss Zee ragging on Roy; would love to see Tom's reaction to some of Wendy's and Camilla's picks.

Blueprints is a neat dice game. The dice are the building blocks for your buildings. Different colours are different building materials. Eg, clear dice are glass.

I really like how Beyond The Sun uses dice: you can use them as humans to research, as spaceships of various levels of power to try to conquer planets, and as loaves of bread for resources (I know that’s not what the rulebook calls them). You don’t roll the dice but because they often swap from one type of worker to another, it just makes sense to use dice.

Really hoped Biblios made this list just for the irony, of having some of the best chunkiest dice that you never roll during the game.

Quantum would be my number 1 for this list. Can't believe it has been out of print for so long.

Great job Wendy!!! Pass the Pigs is a great call back for this! The dice are certainly more unique than other games on this list where you roll a thing and see what you get. I just wish the game had as much “legs” as the dice ;)

100% with Wendy on Pass the Pigs. If I actually logged plays of it over the years, it would undoubtedly be my most played game of all time thanks to playing it on various flights or train journeys over the years. Another game that almost immediately sprung to mind was Crystal Lake where the dice are your workers which you place in a pretty typical worker placement fashion, however the fact you choose the die faces at the start of the round which you then have to pay for and determines turn order and worker resolution order depending on when they're placed. Other games I thought of were Artemis Project, Dice Hospital, Street Masters and Biblios.

Pass the pigs was such a perfect choice! I don't know why Wendy was such a sourpuss, it fit the bill perfectly

Great list guys and gals! Here are my top 10 that I didn’t see mentioned here: 10. Rattle, Battle, Grab the Loot 9. Blueprints 8. Mosaix 7. Poseidon’s Kingdom 6. Grog Island 5. El Gaucho 4. Genotype 3. Macao 2. Sentient 1. Oracle of Delphi

Dice Forge is way better then Dice Realms. I agree with Roy. Great pick Roy!

Oooo cool idea for a list. In no particular order off the top of my head I'd mention Dice Forge, Castles of Burgundy, Formula D, Blueprints, Escape: The Curse of the Temple, Quarriors, Strike, Floating Market, Seasons, and Can't Stop. I'm sure I have more especially in my collection that's just what came to mind.

Really happy to hear Champions of Midgard mentioned by Roy as his #8 game. And I'm especially pleased that he mentioned the expansion. The "dice as Viking warriors" in the base game is already pretty cool. When you "assign dice" at the end of a round, prior to combat, it really feels like you're the Viking leader telling your men where to go and who to fight. But the Valhalla expansion adds a whole new and interesting layer to it where it's not bad if some or even most of your warriors die. Getting their "tokens" after they die and using them again as the fight even more monsters in Valhalla practically doubles the complexity and strategy of the entire game!

I'm really looking forward to see the Z-Team do this list...I think for the most part they were missing the point of the list (or maybe I had a different interpretation of the title)...these picks ARE mostly great in my opinion but I was looking forward to see more wild ideas about using dice. as great as some of these games are, they use dice the way they're supposed to...no wow effect to them

Mike is probably only one who would have included my top pick - Merchants of the Dark Road. Randomized Dice market to manipulate, dice drafting during travel, a dice placement movement/bonus system, and enough bonus dice types to replicate most of the other actions in the game.

great lists everyone! a couple that I would add are Reckoners and Roll Player.

Pass the Pigs for the WIN!! Love it. Lol.

Pass the pigs is an old game. I was playing it like 30 years ago. What a throw back!

Special mention for the rubble die in This War of Mine, a quirky thematically styled asymmetric 'push your luck' die. I'm surprised there aren't more asymmetric / unknown % dice to really mess with gamers' minds.

A lesser known game from like 6-8 years ago was called dungeon dice where it's a competitive kinda dungeon crawl but the entire game is dice with the exception of the player board. No boards no chits. Each die is custom, and some have special powers.

Rajas of the Ganges is one of my favorite games with dice. Love it. Our 6yo has been loving a random older Gamewright game we got locally for free - Go Nuts. It has Zombie Dice vibes with a squirrel theme and a quick real-time situation that gets triggered. Lots of fun, even for mom and dad.

I love the intro!

Also: Tummple, where the die dictate what you wl add to the tower and which orientation it has to take on. Seasons, where the die you draft will impact your capacity, resources, and how quickly the seasons change. The dice also change with the seasons. Roll Player, where the dice activate special abilities, meet or fail criteria for bonuses, and interact directly with your stats in a unique way.

No Troyes?! Nice list. The short of it... there are a lot of cool ways dice are used. :-)

Dungeon Fighter would be my #1

Great pics! Dice Wars has interesting die as characters.

Thanks for the good lists, I was surprised Black Angel didn't make a list : ]

Quantum is my absolutely favorite game! I love the chunky dice. So satisfying! But also, I think it's super cool howa lower number die represents a slower ship, but also moe powerful in combat. That makes for such good decisions. I also like when games use an "exploding dice" mechanism. One of the top 3 games I own is Firefly The Game, from Gale Force 9. The dice are a basic D6, except that in place of the six pip side, there's an icon of a Firefly ship. If you roll that face, it's called "Thrillin Heroics", and you get to count 6 towards your ski check, and roll again adding more power to whatever skill you're rolling for. It's cool, because even if you don't have many icons in your crew and gear, you always at least have a chance to succeed any test

Great lists! So many good options. I’m with Chris on Coimbra although I do also enjoy it a lot. Some other options that might have made my list are Jamaica, Cupcake Empire, Biblios, Kingsburg, Nokosu Dice, Dice Hospital, and the Red Cathedral. Also same as Chris I’d want to consider Troyes Dice but I’d probably leave out Roll and Writes overall.

How the hell did Too Many Bones not make this list? It is one of the best dice games hands down and it’s an awesome mechanic that your fail rolls can still be used in your favor.

Chris is so wholesome. His hearty chuckle reminds me of Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop.

I play dice masters every week on webcam! One of my favorite games

Thank you.... I worked while listening to this, so maybe I missed it...but feel Steampunk Rally Fusion was worth a mention here..... I know it is just rolling dice, but the different resources and how you vent the dice is really fun.

I love Pass the Pigs. Also Bitoku. Sagrada was very novel for us and we enjoy it from time to time, though got burned out a bit.

Too Many Bones. I love that failures can be used in successful ways, and some of the Gearlocks by rolling failures. Brilliant mechanic for people who hate skill checks and random failures.

Nice lists! Want to check out Santa Maria, Unsettled & Monsters on Board. My top ones are Dice Forge,, Teotihuacan, Sagrada, Rajas of The Ganges, Roll For The Galaxy, Tumblin' Dice, Dungeon Fighter, Coimbra, Roll Player & Wolfgang Warsch's Clever series.

Yeah the first one that came to my mind was Elder Sign. My mind was blown by that as I'd only ever really played Yahtzee and D&D up to that point in terms of dice. I'd also played a lot of Risk so that helped me grasp Elder Sign's dice mechanic a bit, but still.

Nice list! I thought that Fantastic Factories or Merchants of the Dark Road would be mentioned

Blueprints is also a good choice... that is the one where you have to stack dice in certain configurations to complete patterns on cards... when you view your structure from certain angles. Definitely a different way to use dice. :-)

I was sorta hoping someone would include Apocalypse Chaos. A coop dice game where you can pass your dice to other players to help them get actions while going up against the aliens. The rules are a bit vague but I really enjoy it. And FUSE is one of my favorite games, so glad it got mentioned.

John D. Clair took the mechanic from Pass The Pigs and put it into Rolling Heights. You roll meeples to determine what resources you get, depending how they land, and can bust, sort of like Cubitos.

Euphoria was the first one I thought of ... Great use of dice.

Dang no cubitos! I’m shocked. I feel like the way cubitos uses dice is so cool!

Love Alien Frontiers! Surprised it wasn't on all 4 lists. Glad to see Manhattan Project: Energy Empire get some attention as well...a very underrated game!

Wow, I didn't think this would be such a big category, but rare that I have zero crossovers. My top three were Poseidon's Kingdom, Camel Up (dice color, number and _order_ matter) and an old game called Die-check where you pieces are dice that move by turning one face at a time.

DiceWar is a really nice asymmetric two player game from a small swiss publisher. Highly recommendable. And also Cube Quest a had a lot of fun playing with my son, as you build castles with dice-units to protect your king-dice and then flick dice at your oppenents construct.

I would have crossed over on Dice Forge, Segrada, Formula D, and Unsettled. My list would also include Quantum, Dead Men Tell No Tales, Merchants of the Dark Road, Genotype, Steampunk Rally, and maybe Masmorra: Dungeons of Arcadia. I may also make the case for the sheer fun of casting the runes in Call to Adventure, which I guess would lend credence to Pass the Pigs!

I used to play Pass the Pigs!

I really like how dice are used in Circadians: First Light.

I maintain that Pop-O-Matic deserves an honorable mention. C'mon, how cool was that little bubble with the die in it? That thing was uber-cool back in the day to a little kid! :-) I know they truly aren't great for randomization, though... Geoff Engelstein did a segment on it once analyzing how good their RNG was and they weren't great.

I don't think many of these games early on are what Tom had in mind. Now to be fair this might have been a bridge to far for the A-Team right now until they all have played a few hundred more games.

First thing I thought of on this list was Champions of Midgard. Right off the start I got a huge urge to play it again.

We need a top 10 list of Chris Yi’s Top 10 Sound Effects

Glad to see tidal blades made it made it. Dicecapades was silly fun.

Mythic Battles: Pantheon - Dice can be removed to bump another dice by 1. Dice that are 5 (dice are numbered 0-5) burst so that their value is added to 5. This allows players to hit high defense values that are bigger than what can be rolled. It's a really cool combat system. Any of the dungeon crawlers that use fate dice like Blackstone Fortress or Big Trouble in Little China. It's cool for there to be a pool of dice that any player can use for their actions. TMNT (or Batman: Shadow of the Bat) where the players action selection shares one die to the player on their right and one die with the player on their left. Masmorra (I know Roy mentioned it at the end), but it's really cool how each die is effectively 6 different monsters. And, there's different dice that can be pulled from the bag. So, you can get a ton of monster variety simply from dice faces. Each die is like the equivalent of 6 standees. Fuji Koro which lets you chuck a die of the matching color for every cube in your weapon. It's a cool idea where the materials used in the crafting are reflected with by the die. I'm less a fan of the weapon durability aspect. Still, it was a cool idea. Kemet is just kind of a silly/clever one. The dice are never rolled, but it was still a clever way to represent pyramids with the face indicating how much of the pyramid has been built.

Great 💗💥

I will offer Fool's Gold and Artemis Project. Although the dice involved are just reguler "pip" dice, they are used interestingly. In Fool's Gold, the dice are not for the players, per se. Rather, the dice are used to setup the initial game state for each round...determining which mines are open and what the initial costs will be for bidding priority. There is also a single die used in a third, optional phase which is a simple push-your-luck choice for all players involved in that phase. Artemis Project is a worker placement (i.e., the dice are the workers) game akin to Alien Frontiers where you roll your dice and decide where to place them for the various actions. However, I like the particular mechanic that, on two of the main resources, lower value dice go ahead of higher-value dice. However, their "production output" is lower ...but this means that a couple of lower value dice may leave nothing for the higher value dice remaining.

First game I would think of is KERO. Fun 2 player game with great components where you have to throw dice as fast as possible while your hourglass-kerosene truck is getting used. And refueling is the best part of the game!

"Pass The Pigs" is a completely legitimate choice here!!

Blueprint is also an amazing pick for this list

Some super unique ways to use dice: Space Cadets Dice Duel since everyone has their own unique set of dice that work together as a team. Rallyman for how you use them to actually plan your movement out per turn. Quantum for how they represent different kinds of ships - their speed and strength. Tavarua for how they determine wave size for your surfers to surf. Panamax you don’t even roll half the dice, you set a number based off a card and the dice are just cargo on ships. Spartacus due to how you lose dice as your gladiator gets more and more injured in combat.

I kind of feel Pass the Pigs arguably counts more than Teotihuacan. Clearly in Teotihuacan, if you removed them from that game, they are dice, but within that game, they’re never used as dice. Mechanically, they could be dials or a set of tokens which you switch out - whereas in Pass the Pigs, rolling them makes them dice. That said, I’m happy with having your cake and eating it, and including both types of reasoning - but I’d pick Beyond the Sun over Teotihuacan - mainly because I like the game more.

The pigs in Pass The Pigs are basically 6 sided dice. They can land in 5 unique ways, one (on its side) can be "rolled" on either side. So they're d6s. End of!

I think we need a Zee-Team of this list. Most of the games I thought of were not on this list, but I'm sure that the Zee Team would mention them.

Chris's #2 would be my #1. Absolutely love that game and love that Zee champions it too :)

Las Vegas Royale is so good. Probably my favorite dice game. I'd add Troyes, Fantastic Factories and Poseidon's Kingdom.

Kingsburg and Pie Town are some interesting uses of dice as workers.

Pass the Pigs is a great choice! I think Call to Adventure would be a great one for the list

If too many bones isn't listed, I'm deleting youtube. I hate dice rolling but love TMB turning "bad" rolls into power via bones

Strike is fun, but our preference is the Impact version which is similar to the Harry Potter one. I haven’t played Blueprints or Tumble Town, but using the dice to build structures in those games is pretty unique.

1:09:56 Yeah - analogously, for example, I am not a fan of pure deckbuilding, just to build your deck. It has to have another element of actually doing something with your upgraded deck - therefore, I feel the same way about this issue in Tidal Blades - at least you are using your upgraded dice to fight off the monsters (or you don’t upgrade all of your dice and use one of those against the monster).

YES!! BATTLELORE 2ND EDITION's dice getting a mention!!! 👍👍👍

Haven’t played First Empires yet but I had heard good things about it. Hope it was worth it!

Don't know if it was mentioned or not...NINJA DICE! Not the greatest of dice chuckers, but I enjoy how the mixing, tumbling and orientation of dice after rolling can have affects on outcomes for each roll. I have EVERYTHING for that game. :)

I was just about to ask about the sound when they fixed it lol

It's currently out of print, but Have You Heard has a unique set of custom dice. It's basically a set collection game, where you need to collect tiles of all the farm animals to win. Not a high rating on BGG, but I think it's a charming little dice game!!

Two I thought of not mentioned: IDW's Adventures system (Ninja Turtles or Batman, take your pick). Each hero has a set of three dice with unique distributions of symbols for choosing actions. The cool part is based on how you choose to align your dice, because you get to borrow the outer symbol from each of your neighboring players and vice versa. It creates a lot of strategy where you have to figure out the best way to share your dice with your friends. Second pick would be Steampunk Rally (and Fusion). Dice are drafted along with vehicle parts, each dice color represents a different power source, and once used, there is a cleanup mechanic, where you have to reduce the pips on the dice until you can clean it off your machine. So, that 6 you rolled will give a great boost now, but you will spend a few turns getting it off to reuse the component.

Quantum for me. Roll the force and each number is a special type of ship with certain moves and powers and using those to your advantages. Etc.

Too many bones, cubitos, roll player, railroad ink, dice forge!!

PASS THE PIGS!!! I've got your back on that one Wendy.

I like the dice in VENGEANCE. Rather than give you checks, they give you actions... or can be combined for various tactical options.

Dice Throne is my favorite dice game.

Would love to see you guys make a 'Top 10 Game components'

Would be really fun to have a "real time month" at the dice tower where the team would play a lot of real time games - could then culminate in a "real time top 10" video

What?! No Red Cathedral?😳 that’s odd, but I respect Your choices… the way you use dice in this game is a blast however😁

This is a great Top 10 list to do! Good topic, varied picks. I'm definitely gonna check a few of those games mentioned. I gotta give a shout to Quarriors, the fun (og?) dice bag-builder with dice that represent different creatures; you attack each other based on rolls and abilities.

Quantum is my favorite for this topic

Pass the Pig, why I love Wendy's input. Thanks Wendy you rock!

How could you not enjoy Coimbra Chris 😩, Coimbra is my 4 favourite game of all time. (But at least you didn’t forget 😉) Coimbra was my first thought and is my number 1 choice 😁 Also like: Pulsar 2849 Ganz Schon Clever Troyes Manhattan Project Energy Empire CV Beyond the Sun The Journal’s of Lewis & Clark Marco Polo Fórmula D Grand Austria Hotel Champions of Midgard Roll Player Red Cathedral Cubitos Quantum

No one mentioned Dungeon Fighter. I thought Roy would choose this as well, maybe he hasnt played it?

I saw they were discussing Top 10 ideas in the chat ... Might be time to do a Top 10 Dice Tower bloopers I'm sure they have enough footage over the years to make a really funny video

I like rapid response

No Tekhenu?? The way the usability of the dice fluctuates is so good in that game.

Length x Wit. A push your luck dice word game that is amazing and yet impossible to find.

Surprised to not see Too Many Bones on anyone’s list!

Wendy - Sagrada is great!!!

Bang! The Dice Game or Quarriors!

Lorenzo il Magnifico is another good one

Wendy, my mother loves that game as well and there is no question that the pigs count as dice, just as the meeples do in Rolling Heights.

The pigs in Pass the Pigs are absolutely dice IMO.