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First use of dice to determine direction Question
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?
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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. ↩︎
1 answer
The earliest game I know of that chooses random discrete directions is Mahjong. The earliest year I see in the Wikipedia Mahjong article is 1870.
Mahjong typically starts by randomly assigning the 4 players to the 4 positions around the table.
Many people start a game of Mahjong by shuffling the 4 wind tiles (the east wind, the south wind, the west wind, and the north wind) and have each of the 4 players choose one, determining their position around the table.
Other people start a game of Mahjong having each player roll ordinary 6-sided dice, with the player who rolls the highest becoming east, the second-highest becoming south, and so on. This seems like it may exactly answer your question, but it's unclear to me if this first started with very early versions of Mahjong, or if it's a very recent innovation.
I've heard that "Mahjong wind direction indicator dice" exist (also called "prevailing wind marker") with the same markings as the 4 wind tiles. If it were rolled to pick directions, it would likely exactly answer your question. However, my understanding is that it's never actually rolled like a dice, it's only set as a reminder of the direction picked by the above approaches.
Since dice in general are much older than Majhong tiles, I wouldn't be surprised if some much older game used dice to pick directions.
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