I am exceedingly pleased with my set. Also bought some of my gamer friends casino dice as a wedding present, and I love those even more. (They're gorgeous, the edges are sharp, and the corners are pointed enough to cause discomfort with careless handling.) I am now a full dice snob and will no longer use anything but precision cut dice.
Gamescience dice are very much worth it.
- Thread starter B.T.
- Start date
the Jester
Legend
Yeah, GameScience dice rule.
Alan Shutko
Explorer
I like my gamescience dice, but I've always wondered how truly random they could be with big chunks of sprue poking out.
I can't speak for how truly random they are. In fact, I'd almost bet they aren't. My primary dice sets are a set of unmarked Gamescience diamond colored dice, and a set of Chessex Gemini dice. The Chessex dice seem to roll right in the middle range of available numbers almost all of the time, while the Gamescience dice roll the full range but tend slightly toward the higher numbers.
Having said the above, they are still may favorite dice.
Having said the above, they are still may favorite dice.
Maybe not 100.000% perfect, but easily an order or magnitude better than anything that's been tumbled.
Desdichado
Hero
The very first time someone made this claim to me, I happened to be kicking around just loafing on the internet. Having nothing better to do, I got a few sets of my old slightly round-edged Chessex dice out and did a bunch of sample rolls, recording the frequency of each face coming up. You'd be amazed at 1) how many rolls you can do in 15 minutes when you're not doing anything else, and 2) how random my sampling ended up actually being.
It may be that there's a statistical difference in randomness of Game Science vs. "regular" gaming dice, but if so, I couldn't see it. If my non-Game Science dice aren't truly random, they're still close enough that I'd be willing to bet that the difference isn't statistically very significant.
Granted, I freely admit that I did not take the time to calculate or even estimate how big of a sample I needed to do with my dice to truly get a representative sample. I just rolled a whole bunch.
Plus, the Game Science dice are expensive, and surprisingly quite ugly. I'm perfectly happy not owning a set.
Per THIS article on Forbes (they were actually quoting this blog entry), the sprue actually does affect randomness.
However, they say that for normal tabletop gaming, it doesn't make that much of a difference. Here is the relevant portion of the result blog entry, copied and pasted for your reading convenience:
"It’s worth stressing that based on our tests you would need a lot of dice rolls before you saw a meaningful difference in any of these gaming dice — roll a thousand times and maybe you’ll see 5 or 10 less of a given number than you’d expect (or more). So for gaming purposes both dice will work just fine. Seriously."
"But that said Chessex dice (and in theory any rounded-edged dice) are going to roll less close to true. Because of the randomness of the process that changes the shape of the dice, there’s no way to predict which faces are going to roll better or worse. Indeed this means that you could have dice that are “lucky” and roll high more often or crit more often, and “cursed” dice that seldom roll 20s and fumble more often."
"With GameScience dice, on the other hand, you know that the 14 will roll substantially less than any other result — so technically the dice will roll low, but the 20 should roll just about as often as the one, or the 10. If you carefully sand the flashing down on the GameScience dice you should get a result that is very close to being truly random."
However, they say that for normal tabletop gaming, it doesn't make that much of a difference. Here is the relevant portion of the result blog entry, copied and pasted for your reading convenience:
"It’s worth stressing that based on our tests you would need a lot of dice rolls before you saw a meaningful difference in any of these gaming dice — roll a thousand times and maybe you’ll see 5 or 10 less of a given number than you’d expect (or more). So for gaming purposes both dice will work just fine. Seriously."
"But that said Chessex dice (and in theory any rounded-edged dice) are going to roll less close to true. Because of the randomness of the process that changes the shape of the dice, there’s no way to predict which faces are going to roll better or worse. Indeed this means that you could have dice that are “lucky” and roll high more often or crit more often, and “cursed” dice that seldom roll 20s and fumble more often."
"With GameScience dice, on the other hand, you know that the 14 will roll substantially less than any other result — so technically the dice will roll low, but the 20 should roll just about as often as the one, or the 10. If you carefully sand the flashing down on the GameScience dice you should get a result that is very close to being truly random."
I may or may not have game science dice- they DO look familiar, but I have lots. Of course, if I do have them, they're in big buckets of dice, so they're being "tumbled" to a certain extent...
Tequila Sunrise
Adventurer
I do like 'em, but I don't think my GS d14s and d16s are any more balanced than my non-GS dice. 
Also, I wish GS dice came with colored-in numbers. I don't like squinting at dice.
Also, I wish GS dice came with colored-in numbers. I don't like squinting at dice.
frankthedm
First Post
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