Today friends, I'm here to tell you - no. The Dice Do Not Hate You.
That die isn't lucky.
That die isn't cursed.

The problem actually is actually the genuine flaws in the manufacturing process of the dice.

This insight for me came about as I was reading a couple posts from Natfka over on his blog (part 1 and part 2) went semi-obsessive. In it, he linked to a video I'd seen posted before elsewhere, but hadn't paid attention to before.

You see... Lou Zocchi over at Game Science is a bit of a nutjob when it comes to dice, and for good reason. You know the 100-sided golf ball die? He invented those. Precision d5s? Yeah. So anyway... back at Gen Con '08 the following videos were recorded: Part 1 and Part 2. The short version is that up until the painting and finishing process, the biggest difference between GameScience dice and everything else is the quality of plastic. After that, most manufactures dip the dice in paint and then send them through rock tumblers to finish and polish them which, according to Zocchi, leads to warped dice with enough variance that a given die will tend to favor a certain series of numbers. That d6 that never rolls a 1 or a 6? Yeah, that's because the die is slightly egg shaped and favors sides 2-5.

Interested, I ordered a set of precision d6s with ink and I was amazed to see they roll with no consistency what so ever - this is good. They also FEEL superior - from the high end plastics to the crisp, sharp edge. They feel like they weigh practically nothing and they roll almost like casino dice. And then I started to feel concerned.

Here's why I became worried You see, with casino dice if the die doesn't travel correctly (in other words - fly across the table, bounce off the wall, and come to rest that way. Craps dice are never rolled – they are thrown. This process is to try and prevent things exactly like what you see in the last linked video. Now when you're rolling 10-15 at a time, this isn't as much of an issue. When you're doing wound allocations two bolter shots at a time, it's far easier to game the system.

So beware, be ready, and if you're curious be buying them from your FLGS or the company that I think has bought them, http://www.gamestation.net.

Point of fun fact: Game Station is only about 2 hours from my house

Edit:
The website is a touch difficult to navigate. So for those of you who are interested in buying a 12 pack of precision dice, I give you this link to the ones with and without ink and this link to dice without ink. Getting a link with just inked was a touch difficult due to the way they do their searches.

It should be noted that if you save the money by going with uninked dice, you should not play with the dice until you ink them yourself. Uninked dice are harder to read, especially at 4-6 across a crowded battlefield.

If the precision dice weren't prefect cubes (which I guess is what makes them precise. . .), I would buy some. But good find on those videos.

What's wrong with perfect cubes? I thought that bevelled edges caused problems with odds.

The beveled edges *are* most likely the case of the problem. But I got perfectly square dice from the Gamers Edition of the 6th edition rulebook, and perfectly cubic dice feel. . . weird to me.

How much did they pay you for the advertising? :p and I know the feeling with cursed dice, my mates scatter dice didn't miss once in a 2 rounds of shooting and that is a problem when that was 10 imperial guard pie plates :/ and yes as soon as I rolled it I missed and yes I replaced it with my one when he wasn't watching

Heh... I'll actually go ahead and tell the one negative I have with them. The shop that sells the dice, Gamestation.net, from what I've gathered is a very small business. I placed my order the week before gencon and, in the chaos, it got lost. To make it worse the paypal payment expired so I effectively had to order all over again.

To make up for it they knocked 12% off my 12 pack of d6s and then tosses in a free set of polyhedrals.



After all this learning that I've had about dice, I will also toss this one out there: I have a reputation at my shop for being rather dramatic about dice that roll ones. as in I tend to throw them across the shop into the trash can.

Oddly enough... I tend to roll a lot of 2-5s now as, based on what I've learned from the Zocchi videos, they're most likely slightly longer on the 1 and 6 side. I need a set of calipers to I can measure them

Hahahah I have the same rep, this one time my farsight bomb unloaded 14 plasma shots and with markerlights 10 hit and 9 failed to wound... Then in my opponents turn he shot 9 auto cannons into my squad of 2 broadsides with 2 shield drones and I failed all 6 saves :/

This is a great thread and i love the idea of blaming my dice one final time before i switch to the new dice. My one qualm is that i can't find where on the website they sell sets of the precision dice. I can only find where they sell one or two in a nice box, for a display. did anyone elsse have this problem? I can find were they sell 36 dice sets, but they are not the precision dice.

Yeah... that is a bit tricky. I'll edit the OP with some direct links.

They have them in sets of 12 so I guess you would just need 3 of those? To get there go to http://www.gamestation.net/Products_2/O ... nslucent_7 the game science dice are on pages 4 to 8. This has piqued my interest so might get 2 sets and some individual dice soon.

Too bad he doesn't make a scatter die.

If they did they'd be sued by GW. The scatter die is one of GW's creations that they made for their game systems. Same with the artillery die.

You could always get some uninked ones, a scanner, and a print your own decal kit

I suspect that would mess up the precision.

You could just buy a blank dice, if the precision guys they make those, and sharpie on the scatter arrows. Might want to use a straight edge when making the arrows.

Hrm, well my method now seems overly silly.

I am known for 'adopting' cursed dice. If someone has dice that always roll 1's instead of throwing them out, they can give them to me. Most dice that people roll 1's on roll 4-6's for me, and most dice people roll good numbers on give me 1's.

Apparently the facts don't back my superstitious ways, but it seems that being kind to the rejected dice gets better results out of them. =P

I remember another company doing a survey of GW dice and found that they do not have even distribution on their rolls, finding in fact they fall on 1 more often than not. The conclusion to this was the manufacturing of the dice (1 pip up on the mold) let the plastic harden un-evenly, leaving a pool of more plastic towards the bottom of the die.

I have also tested this with 600 samples of dice rolls and came to the same conclusion that the distribution of the rolls does not meet the null hypothesis that they should all have exactly 1/6 average rolls.

I'm currently trying to find the article that lead me into testing it myself. I believe they article stated they went with n=5000 for their test. When I compared my statistics to theirs I had a pretty high power of accuracy.

Long story short, I don't use GW dice anymore.

Nice. I found the right page, and have decided that I am going to purchase 3 sets of the cheapest gamescience dice available, whichthe solid color non inked ones. they sell for $10.00 + Shipping. Although I will miss the dots for easy recognition, I would trade it for a fair game any day.

Just remember that the only way to have a fair game is for both you and your opponent to use the same dice, if you use game science dice and they use games workshop dice then you'll have an equal distribution of all rolls but their rolls will be less random based on the state their dice are in. This less randomness may well be to their detriment or their advantage depending on which numbers occur more frequently but either way it will not be a fair game, it's similar to you both playing with two different rule sets.

This topic is about gaming, I moved it to the Upper Concourse.