Back in the day, I remember seeing the dice included in the B/X sets in green, yellow, light blue, and red.
I don't know if they came in other colors (within the sets) or not.

Here's a link to a picture of my oldest dice.  I still can't figure out how to post pics in this reply!

http://flic.kr/p/dMsabD

Not certain, but I think the early-'80s sets were a single color, while later -'80s sets were different colors, with an elongated D8.

sauromatian wrote:Not certain, but I think the early-'80s sets were a single color, while later -'80s sets were different colors, with an elongated D8.

I got an early '80s Moldvay set and think it was single colour.

My best friend has these sets, and I will always remember the dice colors in his sets: one set was "light mud brown", the other "pea soup green". I always seemed to get light blue dice every time I bought a boxed game, so these were memorable. We were playing in the car once and several of his dice went flying out the car window from the dashboard when his dad made a sharp turn.

That's right, both sets I remember had a sort of swirled pattern.

grodog wrote:I have a set that were mixed colors, as well as a set that were all orange.  Will dig around to see what others may be amongst my now-unused-dice bag.

OK, here are a few pics from my older dice:

1) this one shows the mixed colors set I had, and I'm nearly positive that it came with the Moldvay/Marsh Basic or Cook Expert sets; IIRC the d12 was the same pea-green color as the d4 adn d20.  I'm pretty sure that the two blue dice to the right were DragonDice percentage dice (but it's possible that the set was one d10 was blue and one green, perhaps---come to think of it, the green d10 definitely wasn't in my that Moldvay dice set:  perhaps it came from Star Frontiers or Gangbusters):



2) More older dice (plus one jawa): the orange dice were from an early DragonDice set; the pink/white worn d20s were #'d 0-9 twice and came with my Top Secret set (there were 2 of those medium brown dice too, at one point, so perhaps they came with TS?). The mottled brown-ish is 0-9 twice, too, but much newer. The blue d4 solitare above the orange dice is the only one I have left from my original 1977 Holmes Basic dice, while the solid d8 next to it, and the jewel d4/d6 to the top right are newer sets bought along way.



3) this one shows some of the light blue dice, with three different variations on the blue colors:   the very light-blue d100s (same as in the first pic above) vs .the medium blue dice that almost match but are darker (clustered in the middle foreground; it's possible that these are just less-worn and are in fact the same color as the d100s) vs. the d4 and d8 to the right, which are a different hue of blue, a little more of a light cornflower blue or so.

martinglass wrote:G I've never seen any Holmes-era d4 that weren't the uranium yellow.

I have a die fitting that description (yellow). The grade of plastic is very '70s, like the back of the '77 Character Sheets Pad. I also have :
-a D12 with a hole melted into it, like someone wanted to test the plastic with a soldering iron.
-a D8 with the heavy wear typical of '70s dice, but the letter A instead of 1.
-a D20 (0-9 twice) a little smaller than TSR percentiles, uninked but with one set of numbers colored by the original owner.
& a whole bunch of dice like the above, of uncertain vintage but sorted together because of the heavy wear.

Ha!  Funny to see what everyone has.  Man, your guys' old dice sure got some wear on them!  Hard to imagine simple drops onto tabletops over the years could wear them down like that.  Of course, mine didn't get used for about 20 years, so they have a bit more life to them.  Thanks for the pics and thoughts!