Beyond DND: Eight Tabletop Games That Run on Dice — and What They Roll

Walk into any game night and the seven-piece DND dice set gets the glamour shots — the glittering d20 held up to the light, the sharp edges, the metal click on a padded tray. But dice games are older and far wider than any one roleplaying system, and most of the world's rolling happens at tables that never ask for a d20 at all. Backgammon boards, bluffing cups, scoring pads, drafting pools, buckets of wargame d6: each of these families solved a different design problem with the same small machine. This tour walks through eight of them — what each game actually asks players to do, which dice it uses and in what numbers, and how the rolling feels in the hand. Then, because we are a dice factory before we are anything else, we finish with the manufacturing view: what every family quietly demands from its dice, and how game publishers get exactly those dice made.

1. Combination games: the Yahtzee family

Start with the mechanic almost everyone learned first. In a combination game, a player throws five six-sided dice, keeps any of them, and re-rolls the rest — up to three throws in a turn. The final hand must then be written into one scoring category on a shared pad: matched sets of a single face, runs of consecutive faces, a triple-plus-pair combination, or plain totals of a chosen number. Each category can be filled only once per game, so every turn is a small negotiation between the roll you wanted and the rows you have left. Chase the five-of-a-kind too long and you end up scratching a zero into a category you needed; bank too early and you watch someone else's hot streak run away with the pad.

This engine is genuinely public property. Folk versions circulated for generations under names like Yacht and Generala, and bar-top poker dice run the same idea with card suits on the faces; Yahtzee is simply the trademarked name most families know it by. That shared ancestry is why the format shows up everywhere from cruise ships to phone apps: the rules fit on a napkin, and the equipment is five matched d6 and a pencil.

At the table, this family is rhythm. Cup, rattle, slam, slide — dozens of times an evening, hundreds of times in a holiday week. The dice that serve it best are unglamorous and tough: 16mm pip-faced d6 with softly rounded corners so they tumble briskly and stop fast on a kitchen table, and pip paint that survives years of being shaken against five siblings. Nothing here is polyhedral; where DND dice are cast to be admired one at a time, a combination dice set earns its keep by being five identical, indestructible workers.

2. Farkle: six dice, one nerve check

Farkle is one of the great traditional folk dice games — nobody owns it, house rules vary by household, and that is half its charm. The equipment is six d6, full stop. On your turn you roll all six and look for scorers: single high-value faces count on their own, and three-of-a-kind combinations count for more. You must set aside at least one scoring die, and then comes the whole game in one question: bank the points you have showing, or throw the remaining dice again for more? Roll and find no scorer at all, and everything you built this turn evaporates — that bust is the "farkle" the game is named for. Clear all six dice into scoring sets and most tables let you scoop them up and keep going, a rush usually called hot dice. First to a big agreed total wins.

It is the purest push-your-luck design in common circulation: no board, no cards, no memory burden, just probability and greed staring at each other across the table. Because the whole game is the dice, Farkle travels as a tube, a bag or a tin — and because six dice get thrown together over and over, they need to be a matched dice set in the strict sense: same size, same weight, same corner radius, so no die in the fistful behaves differently from its mates. Bright colourways sell well here; a folk game with no box art expresses its whole personality through the six cubes themselves.

3. Liar's Dice: bluffing under the cup

Liar's Dice is a centuries-old bluffing game, played in ports and taverns long before anyone printed a rulebook, and it remains public property today. Each player gets a cup and five d6. Everybody rolls at once, slams the cup down, and peeks only at their own dice. Then the bidding starts: a player claims that across every hidden cup on the table there are at least so many dice showing a particular face — "four threes", say. The next player must either raise that bid or call the liar. When someone calls, all cups lift, the table counts, and whoever was wrong — the bidder who overreached or the challenger who doubted a true claim — forfeits a die. Play continues until one player holds the last dice on the table.

What makes it sing is that the dice are almost incidental to the drama. You know five dice; you are betting on thirty. The game trains a strange double skill — rough probability in one ear, poker-face reading in the other — and it scales from two players to a rowdy crowd with nothing more than extra cups.

The physical demands are specific. Rolls must be private, so cups matter as much as dice: a felt-lined cup muffles the giveaway rattle of doubles. Dice must read instantly the moment cups lift, which favours opaque bodies with big high-contrast pips over anything sparkly. And since dice migrate between reveals, tables love per-player colours — five red, five ivory, five black — so every die walks itself back to the right cup. A boxed edition for six players carries thirty d6, which is a very different manufacturing brief from one precious DND dice set.

4. Backgammon: the ancient race

Race games moved by two dice are older than written rules; boards built on the same skeleton appear across the ancient Mediterranean and Middle East, and backgammon is the branch of that family still played competitively today. Each player runs fifteen checkers around the board toward home. Every turn you roll two d6 and spend the two numbers as separate moves — or stack them on one checker — while doubles play twice over, four moves from two dice. Land on a lone enemy checker and it restarts its journey; the first player to bear all fifteen checkers off the board wins. Layered over the race is the doubling cube: an oversized six-faced marker printed 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, used to raise the stakes of the game mid-play. A twentieth-century addition to an ancient design, it turned backgammon into a duel of nerve as much as luck, and the concept is as public-domain as the game itself.

Backgammon's dice culture is the most exacting outside a casino. Club and tournament players insist on precision dice — faces machined flat, corners uniformly rounded so the dice tumble chaotically — and they roll from lipped cups precisely so that no practised wrist can influence the outcome. The sound of two dice on hardwood is the game's heartbeat, which is why material choice is felt here more than anywhere: acrylic clicks brightly, while wood lands with a warm knock that suits a walnut board. It is no accident that wooden dice remain a beloved spec for classic board sets — quiet, tactile, and aged into character rather than out of it.

5. Street dice: two d6 against a wall

Strip a dice game down to its absolute minimum and you get the craps family: two d6, a shooter, and a crowd. The folk structure — descended from an old English game called Hazard — works like this: the shooter's opening throw can win outright on certain totals and lose outright on others; any other total becomes the shooter's number, and the round continues, throw after throw, until the shooter either repeats that number and wins or throws a seven and loses. Everyone else lives and dies on the outcome, which is why the game generates more collective noise per die than anything else in this article. Street versions add one beautifully practical rule: the dice must bounce off a wall, curb or backboard, a guarantee of honest tumbling that needs no referee.

The dice tell the story of the game's two lives. In its casino form, the same design is played with precision-made, sharp-edged transparent dice — see-through so that loads and hidden work have nowhere to hide, sharp-cornered so they rebound unpredictably off the table's back wall, and retired frequently. In its street and family form, ordinary rounded d6 with bold pips do the job, because the wall does the randomising. Either way, the pair is the entire equipment list, and players form attachments to them that border on superstition — warmed in the palm, spoken to, blown on. Two cubes, endlessly replaceable, and yet nobody wants to replace theirs. For a manufacturer, the brief is bold readable pips, honest corners, and colours that photograph well in motion.

6. Dice-drafting eurogames

Modern hobby design handed dice games a clever inversion in the 2010s: instead of rolling dice to see whether your plan works, roll them first and make the results the market. In a dice-drafting game, a communal pool of dice — often twenty or more — is rolled at the start of each round. Players then take turns claiming one die at a time, and the claimed die's value, and frequently its colour, determines what that player may do: which resource arrives, which action fires, which slot on a personal board it may legally occupy. The randomness lands before any decisions are made, so the game feels fair even to dice-sceptics; the pain arrives socially instead, because every die you draft is a die your rival visibly wanted. Hobby shelves now carry dozens of variations on the idea, from stained-glass window puzzles to worker-placement hybrids where the dice are the workers.

As physical objects, drafting dice are components, not talismans. A single box may carry anywhere from twenty to ninety d6 across five or six colours, and the design leans on translucent, jewel-toned acrylic because the pool has to look sortable at a glance from across the table. The manufacturing question that decides whether these board game dice feel premium is consistency: every blue die in the pool identical to every other blue die, this production lot identical to last year's reprint, sizes uniform so the drafting display sits tidy. One mismatched batch and a reprint's dice sit visibly odd beside the originals — the kind of detail forum photographers find within a week of release.

7. Dice-building games

Take deck-building's satisfying arc — start weak, buy better, feel your engine improve — and swap the cards for dice, and you get the dice-building category, popularised in the early 2010s by titles such as Quarriors! and later Dice Masters. The loop runs like this: you begin with a bag of modest starter dice. Each turn you draw a fixed handful from the bag, roll them, and spend what the faces show to buy stronger dice from a central market. Purchases go into your bag, so over the course of the game the random handful you draw tilts steadily from chaff toward power. The dice themselves are the economy, the hand of cards and the combat system all at once.

From the factory side of the table, this is the most demanding category in gaming, because almost nothing in the box is a standard die. Faces carry engraved or printed symbols instead of pips — energy icons, character art, blank "miss" faces — and nearly every die design in the game is unique, colour-coded by faction or rarity. A single retail box can hold well over a hundred custom dice across dozens of distinct face layouts. That raises problems folk games never meet: symbol artwork must stay legible at 12mm or 16mm, recessed faces need paint fill that stays flush through thousands of bag-draws, and every unique design needs its own tooling or printing pass. It is custom dice manufacturing at its most intense — a whole game's rules encoded on the faces of its dice set.

8. Wargaming: buckets of d6

At the far end of the volume scale sits miniature wargaming, where armies of painted models fight across scenery-covered tables and every clash is settled by pools of dice. Games Workshop's Warhammer 40,000 is the most visible name in the hobby, and dozens of historical, fantasy and sci-fi systems share the same general shape. Described generically, the resolution works as a chain of d6 filters: the attacker gathers a pool of dice proportional to the attack — one die per shot, per swing, per model — and rolls the lot against a target number to hit. The successes are picked up and rolled again to see which hits actually wound. Then the defender rolls their own dice to save what can be saved. A fistful becomes a handful becomes a trickle, and the surviving dice tell you what just happened on the battlefield.

The practical consequence is glorious: rolling thirty, forty, sixty d6 at once is completely normal, and wargamers buy plain d6 by the tube and the brick. Some systems and older editions add speciality dice on top — direction dice marked with arrows to show where a wayward shell or template drifts, distance dice to say how far — which is where the hobby's scatter concepts live. At the table the skill is logistics: roll the bucket into a tray, sweep out the misses, snatch up the hits and reroll them, all in seconds, turn after turn. That is why uniformity beats beauty here — sixty dice must read as one population — and why faction dice are such beloved merchandise: a squad's d6 in army colours, an icon engraved where the six (or the one) normally sits. It is a huge, permanent market for custom dice, one carton at a time.

9. What each family demands from its dice

Line the eight families up and they sort themselves between two poles. At one pole: fistfuls of matched d6. Farkle's six, Liar's thirty, a drafting pool's ninety, a wargamer's bucket, and the humble board game dice packed inside ten thousand retail boxes. What this pole demands is repeatability — identical size, weight, colour and corner radius across dozens or hundreds of pieces, faces that read at arm's length, corners rounded to stop quickly in a tray, and a unit cost low enough that boxing ninety of them doesn't sink the game's margin. The manufacturing answer is injection-moulded acrylic dice: a steel mould delivers the same cube every cycle, pips arrive moulded rather than painted-on, batch dyeing keeps colour lots honest, and tumbling rounds every corner by the same measure. It is the quiet technology underneath most of the dice games in this article.

A folk game needs a hundred dice nobody notices. A roleplaying table needs seven dice nobody forgets.— how our production manager splits every incoming quote

At the other pole: the premium single set — the tradition DND dice built. One player, one beautiful dice set, rolled a few dozen times a night and admired between turns. Here the economics invert: unit cost matters less than presence, so the materials get luxurious. Sharp-edge resin is hand-poured and hand-sanded to optical clarity; metal carries real heft and enamel colour; gemstone dice are carved from solid mineral, no two sets alike; wood brings warmth to match a heirloom board. A premium DND dice set is closer to jewellery manufacture than to component moulding, and buyers treat it accordingly.

Most families, of course, live somewhere between the poles — and several make demands all their own, which is what the table below untangles.

Game family	Typical dice	On the table	What matters most
Yahtzee-style	5 pip d6	One shared handful	Pip durability, fast-stopping corners
Farkle	6 d6	One shared handful	Matched weight across the set
Liar's Dice	5 d6 per player	15–30 hidden	Instant reads, per-player colours
Backgammon	2 d6 each + doubling cube	4 dice + cube	Precision faces, honest tumbling
Street dice	2 d6	One pair	Bold pips, honest corners
Dice drafting	20–90 coloured d6	Central pool	Colour and size consistency
Dice building	100+ custom-face dice	Bags per player	Symbol legibility, unique tooling
Wargaming	30–60+ d6	Buckets per side	Population uniformity at volume

Liar's Dice wants opacity and colour-splits; backgammon wants machining discipline; dice-builders want unique faces by the dozen; drafting games want lot-to-lot colour fidelity a fashion brand would respect. The point for anyone speccing a game is simple: "dice" is not one product. The same word covers a two-cent moulded component and a hand-carved stone showpiece, and choosing wrongly in either direction — precious dice where you needed ninety cheap ones, or cheap dice where the die is the product — is the most common sourcing mistake we see.

10. How game publishers work with YSDICE

This is the part of the article where we talk about ourselves, briefly and factually. YSDICE is the trading name of Dongguan Yushun Hardware Co., Ltd., a registered dice manufacturer in Chang'an, Dongguan, and we have been casting, moulding, pouring and carving dice on our own factory floor since 2018. Both poles described above run through the same building, which turns out to be exactly what game publishers need.

For in-box volume — the drafting pools, wargame buckets and Farkle handfuls — our injection-moulded acrylic line takes full-custom orders from 500 sets: your colours, your pip or numeral style, a logo or icon on the face of your choice, cut into steel and repeated identically for as long as the game stays in print. For prototypes, crowdfunding reward tiers and convention exclusives, light customisation on proven stock moulds starts at just 10 sets — pick colourways from the existing range, add an engraved logo, and skip tooling costs entirely. Either way, every project starts the same: send artwork, a sketch, or even a written description, and you receive a free 3D proof of every face within 3 days, so the whole team can argue about the design before any material is cut.

The detail publishers thank us for later is consolidation. A modern game often mixes its dice: ninety acrylic d6 in the retail box, a sharp-edge resin or metal DND dice set for the collector's pledge, a wooden variant for the anniversary edition. Because six material lines run under one roof, those SKUs are produced, inspected under one QC standard and packed into one carton — one shipment to your fulfilment hub instead of three suppliers, three timelines and three inspection reports. If you are planning a game, a promo run or a branded dice set of your own, the OEM/ODM page walks through mould costs, minimums and timelines in detail — or skip straight to the checklist below and send it to us filled in.

Eight families of dice games, two manufacturing poles, one small machine at the centre of it all. The d20 may be the celebrity, but the working world of dice is bigger: five cubes on a kitchen table, thirty under tavern cups, ninety in a drafting pool, sixty in a bucket charging across a battlefield. Whatever your table rolls — folk classic, euro engine or a DND dice set worthy of a dragon's hoard — somebody has to make those dice well, in the right material, at the right volume. That part is our game.