My Dice Collection

The Dice

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  Variations on the theme of four. I don't have many 4-siders. Tetrahedra make crappy dice anyway. The log is slightly better, but still ugly. I'd rather have an octohedron numbered 1-4 twice.
  
  
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  Variations on the theme of six. Here you'll see ordinary cubes with pips, arabic numerals (1-6, 1-3, powers of 2, 2-6, Chinese/Japanese numbers, or nothing at all). There are also a couple lopsided dice, a really small one, a spherical one (it rolls like a really badly weighted normal die), a 4-sided log, a clear cube with three tiny dice, the fuzzy dice that hang from my rearview mirror usually, and my personal favorite, a 6-sided die I made entirely out of Legos. You can even roll the Lego die on carpet (it might lose a piece or two if dropped from too high onto a hard floor).
  
  
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  Variations on the theme of eight. Octahedra and a log.
  
  
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  Variations on the theme of ten. I've always found the standard RPG rounded trapezoidal dihedron extremely inelegant. Nevertheless, I have a bunch of them. I like the icosahedron that's been double-numbered. It just feels like a better solution. I get a kick out of the nested ten-sided dice. I guess that one is technically a 100-sided die.
  
  
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  Variations on the theme of twelve. Mostly dodecahedra (which is my favorite of the platonic solids), though I have one 12-sided log. One of these features zodiac symbols, a natural for a solid with twelve faces. Slightly less natural is the one with the alchemical (the eight planets other than earth, the sun, the moon, and a couple of symbols that seem to have some sort of astrological significance. The astrological dice are supposed to be able to predict the future or some such nonsense. I just liked the symbols.
  
  
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  Variations on the theme of twenty. Icosahedra and a log. The green one in the center has two twenties. It's for cheating, though I've never used it. The orange translucent one on the right is the oldest die I have. It's all that's left of the dice that came with my Basic Dungeons and Dragons kit. It holds a special place in my heart.
  
  
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  Other dice. There's a 100-sided die (the shape is a "Zoochihedron," essentially a golfball with numbers on it), a 34-sided regular triangular dihedron (used in Dutch lotteries), and two 30-sided rhombic tricontahedra (one with numbers, and one with letters).
  
  
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  New dice as of May 2005. In roughly left-to-right, back-to-front order: yellow Lego tetrahedron (it's too small to put proper numbers on it, so I may make a bigger one someday); white Lego octahedron with arabic numerals (I'm very happy with the way this one turned out); black tetrakis hexahedron (24-sided); two wooden replicas of ancient 7-sided dice (a septagonal prism (which is most certainly not fair) and a 7-sided log); a pair of dice with bodyparts and sexual acts printed on them (a most amusing gift from my girlfriend); a white die with black pips modelled very loosely after the traditional knuckle bone dice; a translucent blue 5-sided die (a triangular prism that's well-made but probably only fair under heavily controlled conditions); an octohedron numbered 1-4 twice (so much more elegant than the awkward tetrahedral dice); a red 10-sided trigonal trapezohedron with Japanese/Chinese numerals (the characters are the same in both languages); a black 16-sided basic trigonal trapezohedron (awesome!); a white cube with only ones and zeroes on it (binary dice!); a white cube with raised pips that can be read by blind people or in the dark; a brass cube (there's a website that sells whole sets of dice in various different metals and semiprecious stones...I wish I could afford them); a orange 10-sided trigonal trapezohedron numbered 1-5 twice (much more fair than the triangular prism); a translucent blue three-sided log that has both numerals and R/P/S printed near the raised edges (a pretty but not terribly elegant three-sider); two white dice with roman numerals (I don't even want to begin to imagine the distribution you'd get for rolling those together. Click for a bigger image.
  
  
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  New dice as of July 2006. I've decided to stop using the polyhedra names (icosahedron, 10-sided trigonal trapezohedron, etc.) for the most common shapes, and I'll instead use the RPG-style names (d20, d10, etc.). Hopefully that will be less confusing. Starting in the back left is a very large red d20 (my largest proper die), and moving to the right we see a pair of large, yellow foam d6 with different polygons on each side (suddenly I want to have a die whose sides have pictures of different dice) and an enormous, red plush d20. In front of that are a selection of dreidels, in wood, plastic, and pewter. Some are painted, some are etched, and some have raised letters. The big wooden blue one has the English names of the four letters. The little pewter one on the right is from Israel, where they don't use exactly the same letters. The letters on a non-Israeli dreidel (nun, gimmel, hay, and shin) are an acronym for the Hebrew sentence "Nes gadol haya sham," meaning "A great miracle happened there." They refer to the classic Channukah story which you should read about if you don't already know it. In Israel, which is where the story of takes place, the dreidels have the letters nun, gimmel, hay, and pe, standing for the sentence "Nes gadol haya po," meaning "A great miracle happened here." Technically a dreidel is not a die but a type of teetotum, which is spun like a top instead of rolled like a ball, but they are read the same, so I collect them too. To the left of the dreidels are a selection of dice intended to be on overhead projectors by teachers, a fantastic idea in my opinion. The clear dodecahedra have numbers, pips, math symbols, and images of coins on only half of their sides, so that when light shines through them, only one side casts its image on the screen, making them truly d6's. Continuing to the left, we see several more nested dice, including a d12, a d20, and a clear unmarked cube with three differently colored (red, white, and blue) dice inside of it. I like the different colors not because they are patriotic, but because you can tell the difference between the dice (not important if you're just adding the results, but crucial in other circumstances). Just below those are a black-and-brown mottled d30 with gold numbers and a translucent red d24 with engraved digits. These are very good-looking dice, and the picture doesn't do them justice. Just in front of that is a blue d6 with the words "friend" and "foe" on it. This is a silly RPG aid for random encounters; as though the gamemaster couldn't just call the evens friends and odds foes. It's also needlessly two-sided (pun recognized, but not intended); had I designed it, it would have more than just two possibilities. Moving back to the right we see a cleverly built four-sided color "die." When rolled, the "die" settles on the corner seam between three of the four quarterspherical pieces, leaving the opposite piece face-up. Not polyhedral, but an excellent solution to the d4 problem. To its right is a pentagonal prism (d7) with pips cleverly straddling the seams, and, for some reason, arabic numerals on the two pentagonal faces. It's random enough for most uses, but like any polyhedron that is not in the class of "fair dice," it can be influenced by changing the throwing style or the material of the rolling surface. Just above that are a pair of black and white d12 with Roman numerals, and to their right are six d10 with decimal numerals (the reds have tenths, the blues hundredths, and the greens thousandths). Two white d6 are below that, one with question words ("who," "what," "where," "when," "why," and "how") and one with arithmetical symbols (both operations and relations). Below that is a selection of white blank polyhedral dice. I've discovered that dry earase markers and erasers can be used on them, which gives me lots of ideas for games that I haven't followed through on. Lastly in the bottom right are some replicas, including a set of throwing sticks (kind of like a big stack of d2's), a second knuckle-inspired d6 (giving me a proper pair now), and one of a pair of plastic replicas of actual knuckles (I think the other one fell behind the entertainment center).
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  And here's a picture of the entire collection, circa July 11th, 2006.
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  New dice picked up at the 2006 Comic-Con. On request, I've included a penny in the picture for size reference. From right to left: a pair of d6 (black on yellow and white on green) numbered "one" to "six," a large white d12 with pips, a translucent purple d14 (trigonal trapezohedron) with numbers 1 to 14 and days of the week, and a backgammon doubling octohedron (powers of two, 1 to 128). In front is a quartz d8. Most of the fancy material dice out there are too expensive for me to splurge on, but this was actually quite reasonable, and I love the way it refracts the light.
• I don't have any pictures at the moment, but the list of dice needs to be updated, especially if anyone wants to buy me dice for my birthday. My collection now (there may be some duplicates listed above...sorry) includes a jumbo-sized blue d10 (not as big as the the colossal d20, but pretty damned big); a green d10 numbered in 100s; a blue d10 numbered in 1,000s; a purple d10 numbered in 10,000s; a cream-colored d10 numbered in 100,000s; a jumbo-sized translucent-purple bouncy blank d18 with square and irregular hexagonal sides; a slightly smaller solid-purple bouncy blank d18 of the same shape; a hot-pink bouncy blank d20 with square, regular hexagonal, and irregular pentagonal sides (I think the bouncy dice are silicone or rubber); a d20 made of tiger eye (!); a d20 made of amethyst (!!); a game of Pass The Pigs (including rubbery "pigs" which are really just pig-shaped dice); a pair of pipped d6s shaped like knuckle-bones "carved" into the shape of naked human figures; a red misprinted Zoochihedron (the numbers don't line up with the faces); a pair of "pizza dice" (d6s with pizza toppings printed on them); a d6 for determining the layout of the corridors in a random dungeon (it has faces with pictures of corridors, including junctures, corners, and stairways); a d6 for determining the status of a door (e.g. open, closed, locked, stuck, etc.); a large red pipped d10; and a bunch of erasers shaped enough like dice that you could use them as dice. I'm pretty sure that's everything. Thanks to everyone for the dice they bought for me or helped me find. It's nice to collect something.