One of my best board games purchases was a pound of six sided dice. It means we never are missing dice for our games and it enables us to play Liar's Dice with large groups of people. My group plays the elimination variant, not the drinking one. I recently got another pound of dice from Chessex - but this time I opted for the assorted set. Instead of getting just six sided dice, it comes with d4, d6, d8, d10, d12 and d20. I want to play Liar's Dice with these dice too.
Proposed game: D(x) Liar's Dice (Or Nerdy Liar's Dice).
Each person starts with a full set - (d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20). It works like liar's poker, where if someone says "three 4s" they are guessing that between everyone, there are at least three 4s on the table. The next person can either call "three 5s" "three 6s" "four anything" or "bullshit" - in a call of bullshit the dice are revealed and the person who is wrong gives up a dice and it goes until only one player has dice left.
You still only call out a certain number of dice showing numbers between 1 and 6. D4 and D6 work as expected - the number on the dice is the number used. For the other dice it is pretty intuitive. Primes are 1, everything else consists of their factors excluding the number 1:
7 is 1
8 is 4 or 2
9 is 3
10 is 5 or 2
11 is 1
12 is 6, 4, 3 and 2
13 is 1
14 is 2 or 1 (The 7 counts as a 1 in this case unless 1's are wild)
15 is 5 or 3
16 is 4 or 2
17 is 1
18 is 6, 3 or 2
19 is 1
20 is 5, 4 or 2
When playing with wilds, 1's are also wild unless they are called by anyone (if the second person can call 1's then the first person bid too low), so anyone can say "four 1's" if that is a legal bid and then ones are no longer wild. In liar's dice with d6 it doesn't matter which dice you give up, but in this game there is some strategy behind whether you want the potential wilds or you want to keep your d4.
This variation should make the strategy more interesting than traditional liar's dice, because now it is actually less safe to move up from 2 to 3 or from 4 to 5, while in the classical game it was always optimal to make slightly aggressive bids of the number of 4's and 5's so people would bid that there are the same number of 5's or 6's on the table rather than having to call bullshit. Now no number is safe, though bidding a slightly aggressive number of 3's to let the person after you bid the same number of 4's or a higher number of 2's seems like a decent strategy.
This game definitely needs some tweaking and play testing - maybe it should be played with more D20s and less D8s. Maybe dice should be drafted or handed out randomly to allow for asymmetric play.
I'm probably going to need more dice.