Why Are Custom Dice So Common In Games Today?

As discussions about finding the best gamers gifts — we’ve been looking at getting detailed opinions on games and accessories and choosing the ideal gift. We also spent hours of testing to give the most accurate online reviews. The new edition of Car Wars continue — backers of the Ogre Kickstarter project were given access to a secret forum for Car Wars — I see responses about the type of dice in the game and a number of “use normal d6!” comments that make me realize some gamers don’t actually understand why so many of the early hobby games used standard dice.

Even more importantly, though, is that there’s also a significant lack of understanding of why more and more games today are using custom dice.

Dice Were Once Rare

Back when the original edition of Dungeons & Dragons was launched — forty years ago this year! — you couldn’t just easily find weird dice. Six-sided dice were out there, but all of those bizarre dice that so excited me when I was first introduced to them (in the early eighties) were difficult to find for most people. You couldn’t exactly walk into the local grocery store and buy weird dice.

Dice Were Once Expensive to Make

TSR, the publishers of the original Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game, was a very tiny operation and they used the dice that were out in the world. And when the game included dice they weren’t even all that high of quality. As Steve Winters writes in A Brief History of Dice:

“The 1974 “Blue Box” edition of D&D came with a full set of (badly made) polyhedral dice.”

TSR was forced to use these dice because steel tooling for plastics manufacturing was — as it is now — expensive. The entire concept of custom dice was outside of the realm of many game manufacturers of the seventies and eighties, if only because costs were so astronomically insane that the dice would have cost players a fortune, limiting the number of potential players.

Dice Were Cheaper in the Nineties

By the nineties, the costs of steel tooling for dice manufacturing (and all plastics) had dropped. Advances in the technology and skills, combined with the easier access to eastern manufacturing facilities, reduced the setup and manufacturing costs to a point that even small game publishers could start to produce custom dice.

Those reduced costs, combined with the growing popularity of collectible games in the mid-nineties, led to the creation of collectible dice games that used custom dice. TSR’s Dragon Dice (boardgamegeek.com entry) was just one of a number of collectible dice games produced at the time. Also released — further demonstrating how easy it had become to manufacture custom dice — were:

• Chaos Progenitus
• Dicemaster
• Throwing Stones
• Star Trek TNG Collectible Dice Game

(NOTE: All of the above game titles link to their boardgamegeek.com entries. Additionally, this is not a complete list of collectible dice games produced in the nineties. This list merely demonstrates how custom dice were becoming more common at that time.)

Custom Dice Become More Common in the 2000s

For an idea of just how quickly the presence of custom dice in games escalated during the last decade I direct you to:

• Games with custom dice BGG list.

Over 100 games listed, with many of those published in the last decade. And the games are from all sizes of publishers — great and small — and the dice are more elaborate and attractive than the custom dice of the nineties.

Why Are Custom Dice So Common In Games Today?

Okay, so there are more games with custom dice today. BUT why are there more games with custom dice? The one significant reason is related directly to why we saw an increase in custom dice back in the nineties:

• Dice are cheaper to make than ever before.

Between the reduced costs of steel tools (relative to their costs in the seventies and eighties) and availability of lasers for engraving, more and more publishers are latching onto the idea of designing games around custom dice. And these aren’t just dice that replace numbers/pips with symbols, but dice with icons that have effects you simply could not get when using regular dice (except with the use of charts and tables; tedious).

Custom dice in games allow game designers to make the games more than just “roll and beat X,” and custom dice are — from a business point of view — good for the company since they add one more thing for a publisher to add to the catalog. A combination of good for the game/good for the business means that as long as tooling costs remain low we can expect more and more games to include custom dice. (Source: bingo play free bingo games offline or online)

How long the ability for even the smallest of game publishers to make their own dice will last is unknown, but I guarantee that as long as costs are low we will continue to see games with new dice hit shelves.

Why Are Custom Dice So Common In Games Today? Because they’re cheaper and easier to make than ever before . . . and because so very many gamers out there love dice and love custom dice.