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First use of dice to determine direction Question

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Which game first introduced the concept of rolling dice to determine a direction?

I'm designing a board game and I know which game gave me this idea[1] but I doubt it was the first to use it. I'm curious how long the idea has been around and in what form it first appeared.

I'm aware of using 2 d6s to choose a square on a 6 by 6 grid (using coordinates), but I think of this as choosing a location rather than choosing a direction. I'm asking specifically about rolling a single dice to choose a direction. In the specific example it was a single d6 to choose a direction on a hexagonal grid, but the same idea would work on other types of grid (such as a square grid with a d4 for orthogonal directions or a d8 to include both orthogonal and diagonal directions).

What is the earliest known example of this method of choosing direction, using any kind of dice on any kind of grid?


  1. SPIVs (1986) used a d6 to determine random directions for both movement (such as the galactic amoeba or your ship going off course during a misjump) and the direction that the solar flare pointed from the sun. ↩︎

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