I love dice games. The feel of rolling dice is very satisfying and they can simplify a lot of mechanics into quicker playing games. Custom dice are great. Rolling a huge handful of dice for a big attack is exciting. The many combinations of polyhedrals for RPGs is fascinating. But my favorite use of dice is 2d6. That’s two standard six sided dice.
I love using 2d6 because it provides a nice bell curve of possibilities while remaining in a relatively tight space of results from 2 to 12.
The 2 and 12 are exciting rarities, each occurring less than 3% of the time. While a 7 is common, occurring almost 17% of the time. The numbers in between are easy to estimate while playing. The closer to 7 the easier it is to get.
In Catan players can easily see which resources will hit more often and use that knowledge to value their trade potential.
Can’t Stop uses 4 dice that then must be paired to make two 2d6 results. Choosing how to pair them gives you some choice in the game. And the board layout balances the difficulty of rolling certain numbers with the length of the path for those numbers. So you could try for the easy 6, 7, and 8 but you will need to hit them a lot more than taking the shorter but riskier 2 and 12 paths.
Machi Koro lets you choose which buildings to build that will trigger on different numbers. You can build a lot of things to trigger on common numbers or spread out your abilities so you always get something.
Even Monopoly uses 2d6 creating a somewhat predictable pattern of movement which you could study to improve your odds if you felt like investing the time.
2d6 provide an interesting design space where you can be somewhat sure of the results over time as opposed to the pure randomness of a single die but not have to deal with the more complex math of larger amounts of dice. For me, it’s the perfect balance of chaos and control.