New dice from Games Workshop - a review

The shape and the size

The new dice look like they are larger than the classic ones but this is just an optical illusion due to their pearly surfaces and sharper corners. As you can see on the picture they are exactly the same size. They also weight about the same.

The feel

Holding the new dice in your hand is a very pleasurable experience. Their surface is more velvet than glossy plastic and has some hint of texture. The sharper corners provide a wider range of sensory stimuli compared to the previous version. They can be recommended to people with tactile sensory processing disorders for fiddling therapy.

The look

The new dice are manufactured in several colours and with the current tendency to produce „limited edition” dice lines we may expect more varieties coming in the future. This is a great thing because you want to roll dice for different kinds of attacks together to speed up play and you need dice of different colours to do this. Note that you buy the dice in boxes of uniformly coloured pieces.

The colours are not flat or glossy but have a delicate pearly glitter to them which makes them more posh than bog standard dice. It’s like a difference between buying an graphite car instead of a flat black one. Almost the same but you don’t look like you’re in the funeral industry.

Note that you don’t get the two artillery dice with your purchase.

Readability of the results

The dice ditch the classic pips for gothic Arabic numerals with a skull as a one. They have high contrast and are easy to read.

Thanks to the pointy corners the dice rarely land cocked which remarkably reduces tension between players.

Reliability as a random number generator

This is where things get complicated. I mentioned the pointy corners a lot. They cause the dice to stop rolling pretty fast and this makes the dice look less fair. This is easily mitigated by either throwing the dice up with a spin or using a cup — as I do.