Dice dominate at Gen Con 2022, including Dispel Dice actually for sale

My first moment at Gen Con was spent looking for board games on the vendor floors. The next moment I was shopping for an engagement ring — or at least that’s what it felt like. One woman had beautiful hands and was lifting semiprecious stones from a well-lit glass box. Then she laid these lovely objects on a velvet cover, inviting me to roll them.

Tabletop gaming has become a place of luxury. It started with fancy-ass table, but this year was all about dice. At least two vendors — Dispel Dice and Level Up Dice — were hawking sets of polyhedrals that were nearly as expensive as some entire games, and people were standing in line for the opportunity to buy them. Karen Wang (a $2.3 million crowdfunding project for sharp-edged, creative dice that has won attention) was the most prominent name at the event. The Level Up Dice stand was also on hand, with a wide range of semi-precious and precious dice that were unlike any other in the hall. Every vendor was at the top of their game, energized by the interest and the momentum of the crowds at tabletop gaming’s Super Bowl.

Dice made of striated limestone, blue and green, sit on a board.

Ionized hematite dice with purple and gold inlay.

However, it was not an easy task. Wang was unable to overcome the difficulties of manufacturing and workflow as well as import problems during the pandemic. Alex Abrate, CEO of Level Up, stated that many potential dice-makers have gone bankrupt due to the COVID-19 epidemic.

“The problem is that it’s a niche market,” he said, his voice muffled by the mandatory face mask that guests were asked to wear this year. “The problem is that it’s a niche market with very feverish […] customers. All of a sudden we saw a new generation looking to take over the company. [and]Capitalize on the dice market. And then COVID hit, which meant that there wasn’t the avenue to get out of there. There are still places to go. [literally] tons of dice that they’ve been sitting on for two years. […] They’re dropping their prices everywhere.”

Abrate and Wang stand out because of the way they create their dice, and from what materials. Wang relies on liquid resin — sort of like the two-part glue you can buy at the hardware store — and novel inclusions to give her creations depth and sparkle. There’s also the branding that comes along with their names: Crimson Nebula, Eldritch Fire, Magenta Inferno, Faewater — each one an opportunity to connect with the fan of a certain kind of role-playing game or campaign.

Abrate’s niche is semi-precious stones and incredibly rare materials. “What you see here isn’t the only kind of things we work on,” Abrate said. “We work on things in four figures, five figures. We just finished doing a set of dice out of a Tiger I from World War II.”

A woman with purple hair and a dice necklace stands next to a set of green dice. — Dicemaker Yaniir poses with here blacklight reactive dice, only on sale at this year’s Gen Con 2022.

Indrani Ganguly was representative of another cohort of dicemakers at Gen Con this year — independent crafters who sell their wares online. Her problems during the pandemic were not related to the fact that she was the first Indian modern dicemaker. The air bubbles in her dice sets were her greatest challenge.

Blue die with purple ink and flower inclusions.

“A pressure pot is basically an air compressor tank which compresses any air bubbles in the resin once you put it in there,” Ganguly explained. “So it cures while it’s inside the pressure pot, which means that there’s no bubbles or no little voids in the dice. And that sort of stuff isn’t just available at a Lowe’s or Harbor Freight or stuff like that back home [in Mumbai]. I have to go hunt down these industrial-grade ones and be like, ‘Listen, I don’t want 20 of them. It’s just one. Can we please figure something out?’ And it was a lot of that for me.”

Ganguly accepted the Diana Jones Award in behalf of Ajit George.Journeys through the Radiant Citadel(), used the proceeds from her dice sales to pay for her trip to Gen Con.

She says she loves the work — even when a single set of dice can take hours to perfect.

“It takes a lot of work and effort to be able to get it to the point where people see it online,” Ganguly said, “where it’s super glossy and beautiful without any scratches or marks. And that’s hours of work — usually five to six hours of work per step in my seven-step polishing process alone.”

Ganguly also creates bespoke dice for clients. A client requested that her breastmilk be used in the making of her dice. Another wanted raven feathers — a nod to Critical Role’s Vax’ildan.

How about dice with Mountain Dew inside them?

“I aim to make aesthetically pleasing dice,” Ganguly said. “I’m not necessarily wanting to make the most cursed dice imaginable.”

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