#about dice

Oh! So this one is interesting. There are a lot of little things to note beyond size so I’ll compare the 4 big dice makers you’ll run across: Chessex, hddice, Crystal Caste, and Gamescience. The biggest is that Gamescience does not polish or tumble their dice, so they have sharp, precision edges. They also are only inked by hand, so you can buy them inked or uninked! But there are some other things I’ll cover. :)

Here are the four lined up:

From left to right: Chessex, Crystal Caste, hddice, and Gamescience!

You can see that all of them are a bit bigger than the Crystal Caste dice. You can also see the slight font differences. the Chessex 0 is very skinny, the CC one is round, the 8s on all of them are very different. You also see that the font layout

Font is a BIG deal in the dice world. You can’t copyright shapes, but you can copyright fonts. So if you are out there making and selling casts of dice from any of these makers you can actually get in HUGE trouble because you are copying their font without permission. @battlecrazed-axe-mage has a great post about it. I highly recommend you read it before making and selling or buying dice from folks who are using casts to make and sell dice. :/Anyway, back to font.

Here, top to bottom, left to right: hddice, Crystal Caste, Chessex, and Gamescience. 

You can see hddice and Crystal Caste designate their 9s and 6s using a . to show the bottom. Chessex and Gamescience use _ to designate the bottoms of their 9s and 6s. You can also see that the layout of numbers on the gamescience dice is completely different than the other three, who all follow the same distribution. (Don’t worry, the gs one still follows the number of sides + 1 rule that most playable dice follow!)

The final big difference is how they are made and sold!

Above we see three gamescience dice. We have my hand inked d20 in white and two uninked pieces. You can see that they colors are fairly plain–pretty much only opaques and clears. They don’t often use fancy glitter, or swirly colors because their set up isn’t equipped and because sometimes the colors in those plastics don’t bind well and the dice is unstable! Additionally, they get their sharp edges by not tumbling their dice. They extrude the dice into a little fill mold, then cut them off (think model car pieces?) You can see the clip marks where I drew arrows. These sometimes need to be sanded down. A lot of people find them ugly, but I personally don’t mind them.