That's why I chose dice. Dice are amazing, because their rolls might be random, but through distribution of symbols and attaching mechanics that allow players to manipulate the outcome, the designer gets an element of excitement AND plenty of room for creativity. It's like in Poker – half of a player's enjoyment lies in expectation of what card he or she will be dealt and the other half of fun is trying to figure out what to do with your hand, no matter how abysmal your start.
Once you opt for dice, there aren't exactly myriads of ways you can go. A designer can either go using them as a sort of currency, or use them as “workers” just like in a million of other worker-placement games out there. I decided to merge these two possibilities – the dice give a player some basic “oil” for running the game, but are also used for activating different places on the board.
But what do they actually represent? I didn't want just abstract effects, I wanted them to represent something that is taking place during every artistic endeavour. Art is not created by some immaterial ghosts, but very real human beings with plenty of problems, facing exhaustion, miserable sleep, doubting their talent and, very often, fighting their own laziness. So I came up with three types of dice that represent something from human nature.
Blue dice represent work. They are used for making pigments or actual painting icons. They are indispensable for every player, because nobody can produce anything without them and that makes them rare. Why rare? Because every turn players have to draft dice from a common pool that is limited and blue dice are usually the first to be taken. But not always... Monks suffer many ills and get dirty during the job, so other dice help them to overcome their weaknesses and put themselves together. So even the greatest workaholic needs rest from time to time.
Then there are white dice that represent human contact – chattering and requests for advice. Players use them to activate “helpers” – brothers from the Dormitorium, which grant strong, one-time bonuses. But such chit-chat creates a negative effect “gossip”, which is together with “squalor” (created during painting) marked on players’ personal boards, and sharply reduces the amount of “storage” for different “currencies” (“friendship” used for paying for many game effects, or space for collecting pigments for painting).
The third kind of dice are orange ones. Originally they were meant to be dark red, but in the factory (for some reason) they changed the agreed colour for a testing set and delivered them in fiery orange... And I liked them. These dice represent the fire of spirit and inner life. First – the symbol of “piety” enables to erase negative effects accumulated during play. Second: they give players a chance to increase their drafting limit from the common dice pool, so the more a player invests into study in a specialized place on a map with these dice, the more powerful his or her hand later becomes. And third advantage – they enable players to get rid of “sins”.
White and orange dice have a chance of rolling a symbol of “sin” or a “virtue”. In both cases the affected player must draw a token from a corresponding pile and place it on their personal desk. Thus they obtain a bonus or vulnerability that can ease, or complicate, their play. Sins and virtues are organized on a personal board next to each other and create sometimes interesting combinations, like “skilled” (a virtue, take one more dice during draft) “looby” (a sin, if you make pigment, make one less).
Virtues and sins proved to be the most controversial mechanics during testing. They were absolutely hated by hardcore-euro players that required total control over their actions. Yet the majority of players either accepted them or liked them a lot – they bring a constant change into one's gameplay and change the flow of actions. If stricken by a “sin”, a player has to decide how much the new vulnerability is annoying, whether it interferes with chosen plans and whether getting rid of it can be postponed and the game played for some time suboptimally. I found that it created a lot of hard choices and tension and therefore – fun. I am fully aware that many players will not be able to digest this feature of Icons of Kyiv. But that's life.