I make dice...

I've decided to make a whole subsection of my website dedicated to various dice that I make. Most of these things are rather whimsical, and a person probably has to struggle to invent a real use for them. But some people, like myself, just like dice, and it's rather fun to have some that most other people don't have. If you see any that you like, most can be bought from me. Currently I am engraving 4-, 6-, and 12-sided dice, but eventually will expand to other shapes.

I engrave new designs whenever I think of something (halfway) clever, so please bookmark the webpage and check back often.


4-Sided Dice

 4-sided dice are always a bit awkward to roll and read results from. My preference for most d4 designs is to put the result at the upper point of the die rather than along the lower edge. See the Card Suits Die as an example.

Card Suits Die

 Pretty straightforward, four suits, four sides. Inked with both red and black. Here you'll note the design style I like to use for 4-sided dice. The result (in this picture a Spade) is the icon which dominates the upper point of the tetrahedron. The alternate style is to put the result along the lower edge (closest to the table), but I find the former usually affords more room for artwork.

Elemental Die

 Another colorful 4-sided. This one is an "elemental die" showing icons for the four basic elements: Fire, Water, Earth, and Air. There are, traditionally, alchemic symbols for these elements, but they are all based on equilateral triangles and can be a little difficult to keep straight. I decided to just use some custom shapes for the elements and color them appropriately.

  • FIRE: Red flame icon
  • WATER: Blue water droplet
  • EARTH: Green octagon
  • AIR: White diamond (black outline)

    6-Sided Dice

     Unless otherwise noted, the 6-sided dice are 5/8" (16mm) cubes.

    2 Pip

    This is probably the most unusual die that I've designed. Standrd six-sided casino dice have their 21 pips (dots) arranged in particular ways. Imagine you have a "Bicycle" die that you've used so many times that the pips have started to wear off. What is the greatest number of dots that can be removed from a die and it still be determinable what is rolled?

    Turns out you can go all the way down to two pips. The spartan design is pictured at right. Here is how you can deduce what is rolled:

    • If the 'center-side' pip is face up, then a "6" was rolled, because that is the only number with a dot in that position.
    • If the center-side pip is not visible anywhere on the die, then it must be face-down. Meaning you rolled a "1".
    • Otherwise, the center-side is on one of the four side faces. In this case, look for the 'center-center' pip (which, given its position relative to the center-side pip, must be the "5" face). If that center-center dot is face-up, you've rolled a "5". If it is not visible, you've rolled a "2". If it is also on one of the side faces, then you need to know that the 4-5-6 values are placed counterclockwise about their shared vertex (on Bicycle Dice); with that knowledge you can determine whether a "3" or "4" is face up.
    The above makes a couple of assumptions. First, it assumes you know that this is a 2-pip die (with its particular pip arrangement), and second that you can move yourself to see all non-face-down sides of the dice once rolled.

    Also note that the center-center "5" pip could be moved to two of the corners and still work (but not the other two corners).

    Got all that?

    Binary Dice

     For anyone who loves the joke, "There are 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary, and those who don't." This die has the numbers 1-6 represented as binary strings (1, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110).

    Book Genre Dice

     A customer was inspired by my Coffee Dice and asked me to create a die with different book genres on each face (the die is for a librarian she knows). The faces were adorned with the following words and icons: Adventure (globe), Mystery (question mark), Fantasy (sword), Science Fiction (alien head), Romance (heart), Biography (open book).

    Brick Dice

     I'm betting there's a fairly large overlap between LEGO-geeks and game-playing-geeks. For that audience I present these "brick dice". Instead of digits 1-6 on the faces, I have building block representations with one to six "studs" showing. The "5" side was tricky since there is not a standard 1x5 brick, so I depicted a 1x2 plate with a 3-stud L-brick next to it (the other digits are represented by a 1x1, 1x2, 1x3, 2x2, and 2x3 brick). These come in a set of 5 colored dice as shown.

    Note that these are in no way "official" products of the LEGO company (or any other construction toy company), these are products of me, Eric Harshbarger.

    Cheater-6 Dice

     This die might look like a standard six-sided with pips, but that is somewhat the point. Instead of a "1" on the face opposite the visible "6" in the picture, there's another "6". In other words, it's a die with two 6s (on opposite faces). I'm not responsible for players getting knifed or shot because they are using a "Cheater's Die" in some game of craps or Axis and Allies.

    Chess Dice

     Six different chess pieces, six sides on a die. This one was a no-brainer. I'm not sure how often people think to themselves, "gee, I wish this game of chess had more chance in it." But if someone does think that, I have the dice for them.

    After a specific request, I also engraved a couple of d8 with numbers (1-8) and letters (a-h) on them so that the buyer could, evidently, randomize the positions of the pieces on the board as well (using standard algebraic notation of the chessboard).

    Coffee Shop Dice

     This is a pair of dice I made for a local coffeeshop/bakery where I hang out way to often (often bringing puzzles for other patrons to play-test). Too often I'd hear the barista ask a customer, "what would you like?" and the response was, "ooohh... I don't know..."

    As a joke these dice are meant to answer their indecision. The white die has different drink types (Coffee, Tea, Chai, Latte, Bottled, and Frozen) while the yellow die has various dessert choices (Cake, Cookie, Cinnamon Roll, Muffin, Pie, and Cupcake).

    I don't know how often people follow the results of the rolls, but they do get a kick out of rolling them.

    Crown And Anchor Dice

     One fun consequence of making all of these dice is that I learn about dice games which had previously been unknown to me. Case in point: "Crown And Anchor", a betting game that is traditionally played by sailors in the British Royal Navy. There is a "betting board" or mat that is usually used in play as well, but I am just interested in the dice. They are six-sided, but instead of numbers there are three red faces (Heart, Diamond, Crown) and three black faces (Spade, Club, and Anchor).

    A game of Crown And Anchor requires a set of three dice to play, so that is what I have pictured here.

    Decision Dice

     These dice were originally designed for a friend of mine who requested a die to help her make decisions. I made two version, each with different responses, some negative so affirmative. Therefore, you can roll both (to get two differing opinions). For a more quantified answer I also included a number of plus or minus signs under the expressions (to indicate the relative severity of the response). So, you can roll both dice and see if the combined result is over all more positive or negative.

    Of course, I would not advise using these to dictate important decisions in your life; they are for entertainment purposes only.

    Emoticon Dice

     I have no idea how this could be useful, but I just liked the idea of covering the six square sides of a die with perfectly round emoticons. The interior of the die is made of white resin which did not contrast very well with the bright yellow surface after engraving, so I inked the etched faces by hand with a fine-point black Sharpie marker.

    Maybe if you are confused as to how you should react to some particular bit of news, you could roll this die and let Lady Luck decide for you. Here are the moods you might roll.

    G4G9 Dice

     These custom dice will be my "exchange gift" at the upcoming "Gathering 4 Gardner 9" (a congregation of puzzlers, mathematicians, magicians, and other people in honor of the writer Martin Gardner). As this gathering is often abbreviated "G4G9", I decided to make dice that have the numbers 1-6 represented by math expressions that use exactly four 9s on each side...

    MATHd6

     NOTE: I have licensed these math dice to Game Station. As they now have exclusive rights to produce and sell them, I will not be selling them on my site (I'll put a direct link to them as soon as they have them available). Here is a link to the dice on their site.

    I grew up playing tabletop role-playing games, including 1st edition AD&D (I still have all of my old modules and DRAGON magazines). I don't play anymore, but if I ever needed to roll up stats for a new character, I have created the ultimate geek-dice for just such a task: math-dice. Instead of dice with numbers one though six on them, I've designed three six-sided dice (blue, green, and red) with various mathematical expressions on them which equal the numbers 1-6.

    These are not your friendly, school-supply-store-dice to teach adding and subtracting. Screw that. If you want to know what number you've rolled, you better be fluent in calculus, matrix theory, probability, trigonometry, and modulo arithmetic. If you're lucky a die might land face up with "1+4" on it, or maybe just a square or cubic root. To the right is a picture of the dice, and here is a PDF file showing the expressions used on all of the faces. And yes, opposite faces add up to the fifth root of 16807.

    So, if your Dungeon Master can't calculate an infinite series or trignometric functions, I guess he'll just have to take your word on how high that Agility Score really is.


    Math Constants Dice

     Math geekiness and dice just seem to go well together. This die gathers up a mathematician's favorite constants (yes, there are favorites), and puts them all on one six-sided. Euler would be proud. You'll find (0, 1, Pi, Phi, i, and e).

    Math Sets Dice

     More math geekiness! Let's not limit ourselves to finite rolls; now you can randomly generate the Natural Numbers (N), Integers (Z), Rationals (Q), Reals (R), Complex Numbers (C), or crap out with the Null Set.

    Periodic Table Dice

     Here's a set of 20d6 I designed around the Period Table of Elements. I included elements from Hydrogen to Ununoctium. I tried to assign many similar elements to the same die (e.g. all the Noble Gases are on a single die), but I had to be somewhat lax as they don't break down into nice groups of six. I just randomly used red, blue, and green cubes for the dice colors in this picture.

    Each face (at 500 dpi engraving) lists the element Name, Atomic Number, Symbol, and Atomic Weight.

    There are 118 elements (with the latest, Flerovium and Livermorium included!), so I put my name and an "atom" icon on the two extra faces.

    Polyhedra Die

     You probably thought I meant "polyhedral die", didn't you? No, this is a polyhedra die: a die with polyhedra on its faces; namely, the six most common polyhedral solids used as dice in games. Got that? In other words, its a six-sided die whose faces depict 4-, 6-, 8-, 10-, 12-, and 20-sided shapes.

    QR Code Die

     An exercise in absurdity. Here is a jumbo (1") six-sided die upon which each number has been represented by a QR Code (a type of two dimensional bar code). Of course, you can't read the QR Code yourself, so you'd better have a smart-phone handy that can. The whole process of rolling dice just became much more laborious...

    The red die in the picture is for size comparison (it is a standard 5/8" die).

    RGB Dice

     For all of the HTML/Web designers out there, here is a set of three six-sided dice that, when rolled, will generate one of the 216 "web safe" colors. I will engrave them on red, green, blue dice.

    Rock, Paper, Scissors Die

     Let's take a simple game and convert all of its arbitrary decisions to random ones! Making "Rock, Paper, Scissors" even less strategic, if possible, I offer you an RPS-Die. Each "choice" appears twice on opposite faces of the six-sided die.

    Roll Again

     A big thanks to puzzle/game friend James Stephens for suggesting this die. I think the picture explains it all. Nothing like a little dice-humor among nerds.

    Stats Dice

     Another throwback to my days of 1st edition Dungeons and Dragons role-playing. Here is a simple die that lists the six basic statistics of a player character: STRENGTH, INTELLIGENCE, DEXTERITY, WISDOM, CONSTITUTION, and CHARISMA. I'm not sure why you would need this die, but it's good to know it's there.

    Weather Die

     Need to determine what type of weather awaits the fearless party of adventurers? Sure you do! Thunderstorms may accompany that encounter with the band of goblins and orcs. Snow might fall as they are obliterated by that white dragon.

    Witchy Die

     Many modern boardgames come with custom dice. An example of such a game, which I also happy to very much enjoy playing, is Wicked Witches Way by the company Asmodee. The game comes with nine wooden dice imprinted with various "magic symbols" in either orange or black.

    As much as I like the game, I have a couple of issues with the dice as they come standard. First, the orange ink is not always the easiest to see against the wood tone of the dice. Second, the paint/ink used on the dice can wear off after repeated play (though it does require a lot of playing). The game actually comes with replacement stickers for just such cases, but I'm not a huge fan of how stickers look on wooden cubes.

    So, I decided to make my own set of "witchy" dice (I should note here, of course, that these are in no way officially associated with Asmodee's game; I just used Webding and Wingding fonts to replicate the symbols they originally placed on the dice). My set is different in two ways: 1) they are smaller (5/8" instead of the 3/4" wooden ones), and 2) I used red ink instead of orange (the red helps with contrast a bit more). If I ever get around to engraving larger six-sided dice, I might address the former issue. The latter is really a non-issue since the color (red not orange) really does not affect the game play.

    Wonderland Dice

     Here's a set of dice designed with Lewis Carroll's classic story Alice's Adnentures In Wonderland in mind. It is a set of four jumbo (1") six-sided dice. One of them has six different illustrations of Alice on it while the others each have six different characters (including: Hatter, Queen of Hearts, Tweedledum, Gryphon, Humpty Dumpty, White Queen, Caterpillar, and Cheshire Cat). The images are based off of the original illustrations by John Tenniel, and are engraved at 1000 dpi.

    The red die is included in the picture for a reference of scale (it is a standard 5/8" die).

    Here is a shot that shows all twenty-four faces of four dice set:


    Word Dice

     This is a custom set of four six-sided dice I made for a friend (Michael Hollingsworth) after he helped his Spring 2010 Puzzle Party score highest on a particular puzzle (though his team did not win the overall contest). His combination of 24 different letters of the alphabet on the faces of the dice yielded more valid 4-letter words than any other team's combination. More details about this particular puzzle are given at my LOGOLOG word-play blog.

    If anyone is able to create a better combination of word dice, please let me know!

    12-Sided Dice

    Astronomy Dice

     The major bodies of our solar system represented symbolically on a 12-sided. The Sun, Moon, and nine planets (yes, I'm still incluing Pluto), and a Comet to round out the set.

    "Go First" Dice

     This is a very interesting set of dice, the concept of which was first suggested by my game-designing friend, James Ernest, of Cheapass Games notoriety. I studied the idea for a while, but it was then another friend of mine, Robert Ford (a mathematician), who devised this specific configuration of numbers on four twelve-sided dice.

    So, what is special about them? Well, imagine that you want to play a game with 2-4 players, and you need to randomnly determine who goes first. If you each simply roll a standard die, there is a good chance there will be ties; you'd have to re-roll... and no one wants that. These dice solve that problem.

    The carefully arranged numbers 1-48 on the four d12s guarantee the following properties when used to see who will go first (each player will take one of the dice and they will roll against one another):

    1. First, there will never be a tie.
    2. Second, and here was the tricky part in designing the dice, regardless of what subset of dice are rolled against one another, each player will always have an equal chance of rolling the high number (and thus being the "starting player"). Put another way, two, three, or four players may each take one of the dice, roll it, and each will always have a 1/2, 1/3, or 1/4 chance, respectively, of having the highest result.
    Bravo, again, to Dr. Ford who came up with this configuration by hand (which I then checked the validity of with a computer program).

    Update! It turns out, after further analysis, the above dice are actually better than originally thought. Not only can the set (or any subset) be used to determine First Player, but the rolled numbers may also be used to determine all starting positions (the 2nd highest number can be the Second Player, the 3rd highest the Third Player...) The chances of all permutations of any given subset of dice are equal, so there would never be the chance of a particular subset favoring some ordering of the players. If you had already bought a set of the dice before this was known, no modifications are necessary! They are just more useful than originally thought.

    Months Die

     Twelve months, twelve sides on a dodecahedron... simple enough. I guess this could be handy if you need to randomly determine the birth date of your dungeon crawling character (use it with a d30, and it almost works perfectly!).

    Musical Die

     A twelve-sided die with a variety of musical notes and rests. maybe useful if you want to generate some random musical compositions? Or at any other time you just can't decide whether a minim, quaver, or semiquaver is most appropriate.

    Pentominoes Die

     I've always been fascinated with the geometric shapes called Pentominoes (the twelve shapes you get by joining five squares edge-to-edge). They make for a great puzzle, and since there are exactly a dozen of them (if you ignore reflected symmetries), I thought they'd look great on a 12-sided die. Maybe someone out there can combine the puzzle with this die and make a killer game...

    Zodiac Die

     Zodiac dice are certainly not brand new, but how could I resist put another set of 12 related symbols on another dodecahedron.

    Buying These Dice

     Most of the dice on this page I'm happy to sell if you think they are so cool you just have to own them. I make them "on-demand" as people request them and mail them by USPS. The cost for most of them depends on two factors: 1) the number of sides, 2) whether they are inked or not. Here are specifics:

      Uninked Inked* Colors usually available
    4-sided $2 $3 White, Ivory
    6-sided** $2 $3 Red, Blue, Green, White, Yellow, Ivory
    12-sided $3 $4 White, Ivory
    Shipping/Handling: add $5 per order for shipping within the United States.
    * I usually ink the lighter colored dice (White, Yellow, Ivory) with black ink so that they are more readable. If you don't care about that, or plan to ink them yourself, you can save a little money.
    ** The prices for the six-sided dice above are for 5/8" size. For those dice that are Jumbo sized (1"), the price is $5 each (white with black ink only).

    I can offer discounts on large quantities (say 10 or more of the same type); we can discuss that individually.

    I might also be talked into designing wholly custom dice, but that would be much more expensive if I have to create new art files and so forth.

    If anything on this page interests you, email me with the specifics of what you would like.

    I'll finish this webpage with a dice/gaming related palindrome: 

    "No, wise Mage, nine dice (d6) decide nine games I won."
    Eric's Homepage