I’ve had a number of dice over the years, so many that I couldn’t
easily give you the number of them if I tried. I’ve currently got more than a
thousand in the everyday use box and the game construction kit and most of them
are D6, because if you can’t do the job with D6, the die that even non gamers
are familiar with, I believe you’ve gone wrong somewhere.
I’ve tried most different types of dice, the ones made out of esoteric
materials, I’ve got at least one set of bone dice, a few sets carved from woods
from places all over the world, a number of metal ones, and more tiny dice than
I care to mention, but forever was on the lookout for something new…
Which brings me to my favoured die type, curiously enough it’s a D6,
but a very particular type of D6, Precision ground D6 of the type that are used
at Casino’s. I’m not particularly an
advocate of Colonel Louis Zocci and his theories regarding the nature of dice
and that only precision ground dice can provide an unbiased result, but when I
first read his words on the matter, I thought to get a few of the dice in
question and see if they made any difference.
They did, I didn’t like them at all…
The problem is that I like dice, I like the feel of them, and that
includes both the weight and balance.
The first set of precision dice that I got were a full set of
polyhedrals and while they were indeed very sharp and very precise, they were
also very light. This gave them the feel
of something that didn’t really throw very well, much like the difference
between a foam ball and a good baseball, and while you can throw a foam ball,
you’re never going to hit a home run with it because it’s not heavy enough to
travel through the air, it’ll just flop about after being smashed.
And as everyone over a certain level of experience knows, floppy things
are no fun to play with…
So I had a look for some heavier dice, and the difference between the
huge unwieldy dice that were too large to use effectively were the dice used in
casinos. The problem was in finding them
for a price that wouldn’t bankrupt the average casino, and so, in the quiet
words of Optimus Prime…
Ebay…
Turns out that loads of casino’s offload their cancelled dice to others
for reasonable cost as they can’t use them once they’ve been used a few hundred
times, and so you can pick up a number of dice at a reasonable figure,
including sequentially numbered ones (My OCD knows no bounds…), and so I picked
up a number of different sets to make sure I had enough to do all the
playtesting on my new game and then made the mistake of thinking that all gamers
only play rogues, they’re not rogues in real life…
Apparently some are…
And so had to start collecting them again…
Then I got in on a kickstarter that was producing exactly the things
that I’d always wanted, Precision metal D6 in casino sizes, very expensive for
dice, but when I picked up the four I’d ordered, I knew that I’d found what I’d
been looking for. There are some
problems of course, average casino dice can put a dent in your table if you
roll them without protective coverings, these things can put a hole in the
reinforced kitchen side if you drop them on there without coverings. So when travelling now, I carry both the dice
and the cloth upon which to roll them, because part of the fun of games is in
the tools you use, and when you’ve got things like this…
You want to use them every change you get…
