Thanks Don (with an O!), Jon and Mr Mollusc for taking a look!

I posted these cards to ask for advice in the design board a while ago, and got some feedback. It was quite polarized. People love them or they don't.

John - there are 2d6 craps dice (with casino pips), and a separate gaming polyhedral d6. If you roll 1d6 it is always the die with numbers on it. So there's no ambiguity. The probabilities work. I'll say more on that below.

Mr Mollusc - "the faces make me want to vomit" - you may want to get some medical advice for that, seems like it would be quite a problem.... Seriously though, the aesthetics is the thing that most polarizes, I think. I'll put you in the hater camp I got a similar love/hate reaction when I posted them here first. I had a play with alternatives. Using a geometric structure much more like the back to represent rolls almost iconically, but in the end I guess I have to go with what I like. And I like the "just thrown on the table" look. Sorry if our aesthetics aren't in tune

"Plus, they're almost useless if you play with any custom rules or use dice rolls differently than completely standard rules. " So this isn't true, and in fact is the opposite of what is true. You can do anything you can do with normal dice (though obviously if all you want to ever do is roll a d20, they're overkill - just buy a d20!). But you can do some interesting other things.

For example, to smooth performance and give players a bit more control, we've played where players got a deal of five cards at a time. They then decided which of the rolls to spend. So if asked for a d20 roll, they might have 2,6,9,19, so they can ace this challenge, but at some point they'll have to stomach the 2. This turned out to be a good rule (for our group, obviously it might make you want to vomit...).

But the big thing is the diversity. Most people just don't have this kind of range of randomizers, and so if you have a gaming group that is creative (as opposed to rules-lawyery), then this sparks lots of ideas and flights. That's how they grew up. The initial version just had the polyhedrals, but we've added the rest so we could do new cool stuff with them. Add to that things like letter tiles, dominos, fortune telling, ESP, short straws and they work very well for road trips, and just generally hanging out with gamers.

At least, they do for me. But then, I guess I would say that...

"Actually, it would take less time than you think. " That's been our experience. A few minutes with an actual deck and there really isn't much difference. Of course, if you're only ever going to roll the 6 polyhedral then they may be overkill, but the all-in-one-place is useful.

"While the faces are very busy, the particular die you want for any given roll will always appear in the same place on all the card faces." As you say in your footnote, this isn't true. Some things are more constrained than others. But again, I'd say it doesn't cause problems in practice. The only problem I've had is finding the unusual-distribution-dice, because each is only on 18 cards. For the common dice, they are strongly color-coded and uniquely shaped, so it isn't a big problem in practice. At least not for our group.

[First post, please let me know if I've committed a faux pas somehow...]

Four years ago I wrote some software to create a set of unique card designs featuring a range of random generators, rendered with some neat raytracing software I'd worked on.

I was aiming to make the geekyest dice bag on a deck of cards.

It took software because the probability distributions of everything on the cards is identical to the real things (e.g. proper /36 distribution of the craps dice), and so everything had to be both random, but also arranged so that no information was obscured and everything fit.

I messed about with it, got a couple of decks made up via digital print, I've had a dozen or so extra decks printed for friends who've raved about the cards when I've produced them at game events. But life caught up and they've sat on my hard drive for three years without me thinking much about them.

So I got pointed to you guys, who together know about as much as there is to know about cards.

They're obviously novelties, they are effectively marked from the side because of having no border (I could trivially shrink everything down and add a border if that is a deal-breaker normally - I didn't because the print accuracy of digital is around 1mm, so borders always look slightly off). It is a 54 card poker-size deck with 2 jokers.

Is this the kind of thing that is worth having a thousand decks made up? Would you buy a deck, just for being so unique? Is it something collectors might collect, or is it only worth a moment's smile and then move on? Should I just be glad I amused myself for a couple of weeks



Incidentally, the image here, and the website at http://dicecards.com, is not final artwork. The final artwork has a different pattern of what numbers are on what cards. Every time I run the software it builds a slightly different combination.

Incidentally the 'series one' thing was just an amusement: I have a set of 3D models to do a casino themed 3D deck with the results of roulette, paigow, slots, and so on instead of the dice: but I didn't get round to actually making 'series two'...