Best Board Games That Use Unusual Dice (D10, D12, D20)

Why Most Board Games Use D6

The six-sided die dominates board gaming for practical reasons: it is universally understood, easy to manufacture, familiar to all players regardless of gaming background, and physically compact. Games designed for mass-market audiences default to D6 because it is the die everyone already owns and immediately understands.

But the D6 is a specific probabilistic tool — it produces results from 1 to 6, with a flat distribution for single dice and a bell curve for multiples. Games that need different probability shapes, wider ranges, or thematic flavour use other dice. The choice of die is a design decision with real gameplay consequences.

Games Using D10: Percentile and Wide Range

Call of Cthulhu (1981)

Chaosium's horror roleplaying game uses the percentile D10 system — two D10s rolled together to produce a number from 01 to 100. Skills, abilities, and most actions are rated as percentages: a character with a 65% Firearms skill succeeds on any roll of 01–65. The system is elegant in its transparency — a 65% skill feels like a 65% chance, unlike D&D's modifier arithmetic.

The percentile system also makes failure memorable. Rolling 99 or 00 (100) in Call of Cthulhu produces a "fumble" — a catastrophically bad outcome. In a game about horror and human fragility, even that is a feature rather than a bug.

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (1986)

Games Workshop's dark fantasy RPG also uses a percentile system but adds the concept of "degrees of success and failure" — how much you beat or miss your target percentage affects the severity of the outcome. Rolling 20 under your skill of 65 is a better success than rolling 64 under it. This creates gradations in the D10 system that pure pass/fail designs lack.

Games Using D8 and D12

King of Tokyo (2011)

Richard Garfield's monster-brawl game uses custom six-sided dice with symbols rather than numbers — but the game also draws on the Yahtzee-like dice-locking mechanic that makes multiple dice feel like a pool. The custom die faces replace pip counting with symbol recognition, making the game instantly accessible even to non-gamers while hiding genuine depth in the probability of specific symbol combinations.

Games like King of Tokyo demonstrate why custom dice can be more powerful than standard dice: a die face can represent anything — a lightning bolt for energy, a heart for healing, a claw for damage — that would require a lookup table to achieve with numbered dice.

Arkham Horror (2005, revised 2018)

Fantasy Flight's Lovecraftian board game uses pools of standard D6 dice to resolve actions, but the game is notable for how its dice pools scale. Characters roll anywhere from 1 to 10+ dice at once, checking each for a target number (typically 5 or 6). The resulting binomial distribution — how likely any given number of successes is on a pool of N dice — is the mechanical heart of the game's tension.

Pathfinder (2019, Second Edition)

Paizo's rival to D&D uses the full polyhedral set — D4, D6, D8, D10, D12, D20 — in ways similar to D&D but with different probability emphasis. Weapon damage dice tend to scale upward faster, meaning high-level Pathfinder characters regularly roll D12 and multiple D10s for damage. This gives the full dice set genuine use throughout a campaign rather than having D12 gather dust after character creation.

Games with D20 at Their Core

Dungeon! (1975)

Milton Bradley's Dungeon! is the original D&D-adjacent board game, designed for family play. It uses a combat system resolved with D6 against monster-specific difficulty numbers — but its spiritual descendants, the dungeon crawl board game genre, have embraced the D20 as the definitive "adventure" die.

Talisman (1983)

Games Workshop's classic adventure board game uses D6 throughout, but it is mentioned here as the template for games that would later use polyhedral dice to add narrative drama to board game combat. The D20, with its wider range and larger critical hit potential, creates more memorable moments than the D6's modest spread.

Descent: Journeys in the Dark (2005)

Fantasy Flight's dungeon crawl game uses custom dice with multiple symbols per face — attack dice show swords (damage), surges (bonus effects), and misses; defence dice show shields. The custom die design achieves in a single roll what a numbered die would require a damage table to decode. Descent's dice system has influenced numerous dungeon crawl games that followed.

Custom Symbolic Dice: Beyond Numbers

Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game (2012)

Fantasy Flight's miniatures game uses custom attack and defence dice with symbols representing hits, critical hits, evades, and focus results. Players roll attack dice and the defending player rolls defence dice simultaneously; matching symbols cancel each other out. The simultaneous multi-type roll creates tension and drama that is impossible with simple numbered dice.

Eldritch Horror (2013)

A streamlined version of Arkham Horror for board game (rather than RPG) play, Eldritch Horror uses D6 dice pools with symbol matching to create pass/fail outcomes for adventure encounters. The dice are standard D6, but the probability math of dice pools gives the system more nuance than the underlying tools suggest.

Twilight Imperium (2017, 4th Edition)

Fantasy Flight's legendary 4X space epic uses D10 for combat — each unit has an accuracy value (e.g., 7+), and the player rolls one D10 per unit, checking how many dice meet or exceed the accuracy threshold. The D10's wider range (compared to D6) makes individual combat unit statistics more granular: the difference between a 5+ and a 6+ unit is exactly 10 percentage points, precisely expressible as a D10 target.

Dice Tower and Dice Tray Accessories

The board game accessories market has grown alongside unusual dice. Dice towers — wooden or plastic structures through which dice are dropped, randomising their roll — exist partly because polyhedral dice are harder to physically contain at a table than D6. A D20 or D12 rolling off a table and across a floor is a standard tabletop gaming hazard.

Dice trays (felt or leather trays that contain rolls to a bounded area) serve the same containment function. Their widespread adoption in tabletop gaming communities is partly driven by the increasing use of polyhedral dice sets that, unlike the humble D6, do not naturally stay in one area when rolled.

The Design Philosophy Behind Unusual Dice

Game designers choose unusual dice for specific reasons:

• Range — a D20 creates 20 possible outcomes; a D6 creates 6. More outcomes can mean more gradation, more drama, or more granular skill differentiation.
• Probability shape — a single D12 produces a flat distribution; a pool of D6s produces a bell curve. The probability shape determines how often extreme outcomes occur.
• Symbolism and theme — custom dice with symbols rather than numbers can encode complex outcomes in a single roll, reducing table lookup and creating thematic resonance.
• Player feel — rolling a D20 for an important action feels different from rolling a D6. The physical heft and rolling behaviour of polyhedral dice contribute to the game experience.

The choice of die is never neutral. It shapes probability, feel, accessibility, and the stories players tell about their sessions. The D6 dominates because it is universal, but the polyhedral set exists because some games need to do things a cube cannot.

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