In Airships, you can choose between rolling for resources (which make you more powerful on later rolls) or rolling to build the ships (which gives you victory points). It also has three different colors of dice: all D6’s, but with different mixes of values.

Kingsburg has probably the highest BGG rating of any dice game. Reading through the comments about it, I couldn’t decide for sure what gameplay features best describe it, so I’ll just have to play to find out. The one notable thing I did find interesting was that after three turns (seasons) of building resources, there is a fourth in which you fight off invading hordes.

Both of these seem to de-emphasize re-rolling and powers to change dice around, so they have more room for strategy and building resources that aren’t just additional dice.

In the near future I will post a list of links to BGG articles I have written during the Rule 0 hiatus; in the future I will try to either crosspost or link anything meaty I post there.

I agree with your take on To Court The King. (For the most part: The ideal strategy is probably to accumulate 5 extra dice cards and about 3 cards with powers. So getting extra dice is more powerful, but it’s not unbalanced.)

I spent some time trying to think about how its mechanic might be added into a more complex Eurogame, with resource gathering, multiple paths to follow, etc. I think there’s some potential there, but I didn’t get very far. I’m not sure how to keep that from ballooning into a super-complex game and/or a very luck-based one. Your solitaire idea is probably the right way to start playing with the mechanics.