Here are the rules for what I call Trice -- it's a trick-taking dice game. The name comes from trick-taking, and that it plays quickly.
# Setup
- The game is usually played with 4 players, but generalizes to 2+.
- You'll need sets of dice in different colors/patterns -- one for each player. The recommended set is the "standard D&D set": d4, 3d6, d8, 2d10, d12, d20.
- An opaque bag for "shuffling" the dice.
# Play
The colors of the dice correspond to suits in card games, and the numbers to card ranks.
Choose a number of points to play to. With four players and the above 9-dice sets, 50 points or so seems reasonable.
Shuffle the dice -- put them all in the bag and "deal" the dice to the players. For the first round, decide on a lead player. In subsequent rounds the previous round's winner leads.
Play proceeds like trick-taking card games:
- The leader plays a die. Other players must, if they can, follow "suit".
- The highest number wins the trick. Ties go to the first-played die.
If a player cannot follow suit, the player can play any die but rolls it to determine its new number. That die and its new number counts as a regular number in the played suit. This mechanism corresponds to trump cards in card games.
At the end of the round, each player gets a number of points equal to the number of tricks taken. At the end of a round in which some player reaches the agreed-upon number of points, the player with the most points win. In the event of a tie, the players roll dice against each other to determine a winner.
# Variations / considered rules
# Exploding dice
When a player rolls a die -- "plays a trump card" -- if the die comes up as its largest value, roll again and add the result to that value. The total value from rolling in this way is the value of the die for the trick.
For example: you roll a d4. It comes up 4. You roll again and get a 2. Your die counts as 6.
(The die can "explode" in this way indefinitely! You could have, say, d6 rolls 6, 6, 6, 1 for a total of 19.)
This mechanism seems best used when you have various dice in your sets, to balance the power of a d20. If your sets are all d6s, it's not clear that this mechanism is so nice or necessary.