Artisanal Craft Dice 6: A Baseline Review

I’ve dropped a lot of dice talk these last few weeks, so today I’m going to do a little show and tell. Here are some dice that live in my ridiculous and chaotic collection. I’ll show them to you, give you as much detail as I can about them, and then grade them using the criteria I’ve outlined here (link to part 5). That way, you can see what I’m on about, and also get a sense of what I value and what I hate. It’s important to understand where a reviewer is coming from, so you can get the most out of said reviews. I’ll talk about what I like, what I don’t like, and what doesn’t work below. You’ll get the hang of it.

Remember: if you want me to review your dice, drop me a line at Finns Wake at Gee Mail Dot Com. I won't promise that I'll love them, but I will promise to give them a fair shake. And a fair roll. Hah! Dice humor! See what I did there? Okay, let's get on with it.

An old catalog page. Doesn't matter how old.
These colors are still available everywhere.

Chessex Opaque dice
SCORE: 4/5

Here’s a good, solid, boring line of dice to use as a starting place.

Clarity   Yes
Heft       Yes

Color     Yes

Theme  No

Value    Yes

The Good: But here’s the deal: you can read most of them from space. They are heavy, they roll well, and are cheap enough that you can get multiple sets and do some bad-ass color combinations to create a 2-and-a-half set of playing dice; you can choose three colors that complement your character, your mood, or your alignment. Black, White, and Gray, for example, looks sharp as hell. So does Red, Yellow, and Orange. You get the idea. You can buy a lot of these dice without breaking your bank.

The Bad: Only a couple of colors are harder to read, like red ink on dark purple dice, or red ink on black dice, but they are listed in addition to the standard opaque colors with white ink. 

The Ugly: These dice are pretty vanilla, sure, because they are lacking the theme, panache, and the sexiness of other dice you know and love. Again, I don't think this is really a negative.

Recommendation: Buy a set. Even if it's just black on white, or white on black. Chessex Opaque Dice aren’t particularly exciting or exotic, but they are perfect for new players; Not distracting, with a high degree of customization by making color combinations with multiple sets. 

Another page from the same catalog.

Chessex Speckled dice
SCORE: 5/5 for standard line, 3/5 to 4/5 for LE colors

Contrast this line with Chessex Opaque Dice for a nice range of prices and styles.

Clarity   Mostly Yes
Heft       Yes

Color     Mostly Yes

Theme  Mostly Yes

Value    Yes

The Good: There are a lot of advantages to doing a blended color theme using heavy Urea plastic, and that’s the strength of Chessex’s Speckled dice. You can have an impressive, functional and attractive set of dice with one or two sets. They cost a little more, but there is no drop in quality and you can still come in under the magical $20 price point with two and a half sets.

The Bad: As cool as the Chessex colors are, there are a couple of clarity issues, although this is nearly absent with their current Speckled line. The Limited Edition dice, on the other hand, are problematic at best, and a nightmare at worst. They may look pretty, but that does you no good if you can’t see the numbers.

The Ugly: a few of the speckled color combinations are just plain wrong. Some are merely unsettling. Again, on the standard line of Speckled dice, this is not nearly as bad as dealing with the out-of-print LE colors, but there are a couple of instances where the color combination was a bad choice, or changing an ink color also changed the concept. I'm looking right at you, Golden Strawberry.

Recommendation: Everyone needs some Speckled dice. For flavor, for special effects (your Wizard can roll Fire dice for his fireball damage), or just for fun. They are distinctive and really unique-looking, and can be combined with Chessex Opaque dice for a full color theme from top to bottom.

Zucati's polished and inked (orange) and tumbled once uninked (green).

Perfect Plastic Dice by Zucati
SCORE: 4/5

Hal Zucati has a mission to create the perfect, uniform set of dice that will meet the needs of discriminating gamers without smashing open their piggy bank. How do these dice hold up?

Clarity   Yes
Heft       Yes

Color     Yes

Theme   No

Value     Yes

The black dice were inked by me in silver. Really snazzy!

The Good: Zucati offers his dice in three formats: unpolished, with sharp edges and minor flashing; single tumble uninked, which burnishes the dice faces and gives a matte finish; and fully tumbled and inked, for shine and nice rounded edges and gloss. These three options, coupled with larger sized dice and big numbers, are awesome for reading the faces at a distance and also for just feeling the dice at work. And these dice are affordable, too; priced right between the Chessex opaque and the Chessex Speckled dice for a set of seven. 

The Bad: These dice are only available in a base assortment of colors, but let's be honest, you aren’t buying them for that. Rather, you want the sharp and untumbled edges or the single tumble matte finish. Either way, you’re inking your own dice, sucker. Now, you can and you will probably have big fun with that, if that’s your jam. And if you get the edged dice, there’s some cleanup to do. For all of you DIYers, this would be heaven.

The polishing process does thin the numbers slightly,
but not enough to be unreadable. It will trigger your OCD,
however, so be advised.

The Ugly: Really the only downside that I can see is limited color options. These dice are all opaque, but they are very reasonably priced and the heft and feel reminds me of some eight-sided d4 dice that someone was making back in the mid-to-late 1980s. The single polish dice in particular remind me of them.

Recommendation: For those of you who want precision edges without bankruptcy, take a look at Zucati. They do not have the vintage charm of the GameScience gems, but what they lack in legendary status, they make up for in affordable design, which is, let's face it, something of a unicorn in the gaming industry, past and present.

Future installments of Dice Delve will focus on new purchases and acquisitions. Look for those posts on Saturdays. And I’ll reiterate: if there’s something you want me to talk about, cover, or review, drop me a line.