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 (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 numerals; 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.