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I've played the UNO Dice Game from Emmorie Jossie a couple of times, and it feels UNO-y without playing anything like UNO. On your turn, you roll all the dice, with one optional re-roll, trying to create chains of dice connected by color or number so that you can fill your grid first. A pair of wild dice let you match anything, while +1 and -1 faces let you add additional spaces to an opponent's grid or remove their most recent number. Can't be an UNO game without the opportunity for jerkery....
The Blokus Dice Game from Brian Yu mirrors the feeling of its parent game, with everyone trying to fit as many of their squares into play as possible. Unlike in Blokus, however, in Blokus Dice Game everyone is playing on their own board, and everyone places pieces of all four colors instead of just one.
Results from our first game
On a turn, the active player rolls a number of dice equal to the number of players still in the game, then everyone drafts a die. You then pick a piece from those available in the row that matches your die, then you draw it in your grid; if it's the first piece of a color, you must cover one of the four corner squares, and if not, the piece you're drawing must touch a square of the same color diagonally (and cannot abut that color). If you've used all the pieces matching the number on your die or you don't like any of the pieces that are available, you can cross out one of your three Xs, then choose any unused piece.
After drawing a piece, you pass your marker clockwise, getting a different color to draw on the next turn. The challenge of the game is that pieces of different colors can nestle against one another, while pieces of the same color can't, so you effectively have four growing tree branches that will interlace on a two-dimensional plane, ideally leaving space for each branch to grow past one another — but in practice you'll draw only three or four pieces of each color before you run out of room.
As soon as you can't place a piece, you're out of the game, and you remove a die from play. Once everyone is out, you count the number of empty spaces, and whoever has the lowest number wins.
I've played Blokus Dice Game five times on a review copy from Mattel, and it feels much like Blokus, but with a co-operative edge since you're trying to make all four colors play nice on your 9x9 grid instead of cutting off opponents to carve out space for yourself. All the meanness of the game is pushed into the drafting of dice, with you trying to stick others with bad choices so that they have to use Xs or use the tiny pieces early in the game to stay alive. You don't have to play mean, of course, but blocking others is still the point of the game, so don't feel too bad about it...
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