Cube Whist

I was playing a dice game (something in the Yahtzee-variant family), when I got to thinking about dice games in general, as I have done from time to time. I know a handful of good dice games (as well as probably more that I don't know), but they tend to fall into a few distinct categories. Off the top of my head, there are the yahtzee-like roll-and-save sort, there are press-your-luck games, and bluffing games. This is all very ignorant I'm sure - I have not done much research on the matter, but I can't think of any for now that I know that don't fit into one of these categories. Now there's nothing wrong with games of these types, but my main love is card games, and from time to time I've wondered if there's a way to make a dice game that feels a bit more like a card game.

You know, dice.

Tonight I had an idea for how to do something like this, which I plan to try to develop into a workable game. It's essentially just trick-taking with dice, which could be thought of as normal trick-taking, but where the rule for deciding which card wins is probabilistic, rather than deterministic as it usually is. Specifically:

• There will be dice of various colours. These are the 'suits'
• Different dice will have different sets of values on the faces
• Everyone gets a random, secret set of dice (drawn from a bag, say)
• Play works as in a trick-taking card game, except when you play a die you roll it to determine its value

In this way it is just a mechanic, which in principle can be applied to any trick-taking card game. For simplicity I am going to have in mind Whist, at least to begin with, as it's straightforward rules-wise, but still interesting enough as a game. As such my placeholder name for this game is Cube Whist (or Probably Whist. I'm trying with mixed success to not get bogged down in finding a good name. These will do for now). We all know there aren't enough games with 'Whist' in the title somewhere.

This idea, or something like it, may well already be implemented somewhere already. I am deliberately avoiding looking into it at this stage, as I am keen to try and develop things without any bias, and I am quite excited by the idea, so want to run with the enthusiasm while it lasts.

A deck of dice

The main challenge in developing this will be constructing a good 'deck' of dice. The structure of this deck will be what drives the game, and so it will be important to try to find something that works. There are lots of different possible options, and it may well be that this could fork off into different games with distinct flavours.

There are a few key things that I think are essential for the structure:

• At least three different colours so that these can play an interesting role in terms of 'following suit'
• Some dice need to be 'better' than others, so that there can be some strategy involved in terms of which to play
• The set of dice should be 'not too complex'. It would be nice if players can reason about what dice their opponents may have, and how that affects them, much as you can do in a card game. This becomes too difficult if the set of dice is too convoluted

There are a few other things that will need some thought and/or decisions, or may be of use for taking this idea in different directions:

• Are the set of faces the same in each suit, or is each suit distinct in some way? (the latter option puts me in mind of the Decktet)
• Should there be some dice A and B such that A beats B with probability 1? (probably yes, and in fact it might be impractical to design it otherwise)
• Should there be some dice A such that for any dice X, A beats X with probability 1 (i.e. unbeatable dice - effectively all faces are Infinity) and similarly for 'certain loser' dice
• Should some subset of the dice be non-transitive?
• Should dice have 'special faces', such as 'infinity', or 'trump 1'
• What do we do about ties? Or do we constrain ourselved to avoid them (which is probably too restrictive)?
• Could we even consider including other dice-shapes (i.e. not just d6s)?
• It would be nice if the structure was 'logical' or 'natural' rather than seemingly arbitrary, which would also help for players to reason about. This may be too grand an aim
• How many should we be looking at overall? We want to have enough that players will have some choice of which to play (and hopefully interesting and difficult options)

There are probably other things to consider that will come up as things go along. Frankly that is slightly too much for me to really begin to think about properly, so I reckon my first step will be to just write down some simple deck and give it a try-out, and hopefully nail a few of these questions. Probably many of them don't have a 'right' or 'wrong' answer — they will just lead to different games. It would be nice though to try get a sense of how these decisions will impact the resulting game.

Once I have settled on some dice-deck (and maybe some terminology for that?), at least a provisional one, I may also looks at crunching some of those sweet sweet numbers to see if that can also be a useful angle of attack. But for now it's time to get rolling!