Dice!

Over the decades, as a boardgamer/roleplayer/wargamer ... you tend to amass a lot of dice. Dice come out of nowhere, from gaming boxes long forgotten, from special sets bought at conventions, from games plundered for components.

I have a drawer in my wargaming room that contains only dice and coloured markers. Some years ago, I also invested in same-coloured dice for each of the major die types. Miniature wargaming is a visual hobby, and I think the visual appeal should show in the peripheral tools as well. I abhor a rag-tag collection of dice on the battlefield. Your dice should be visually coherent and pleasing to the eye!

So, here's a picture of the drawer containing the dice. The top row contains all sorts of specialty dice. The middle row lots of coloured markers, and also 30+ black D6's. The bottom row has polyhedral dice - not all in the same colour - but enough of the same colour to use in games that need it: green for D12, orange or red for D10, yellow for D8, blue for D4. This colour coding is also important for our skirmish games in which we use opposed die rolling and shifting die types, as explained in this post on our Wargaming Mechanics blog.

So, what happens to all other dice that I also still have (mostly D6's, I admit)? I keep them in an old-fashioned candy jar. The jar itself is a nice object to decorate the wargaming room with, and whenever a nephew comes over for a game, he can choose a die from the jar to take home. Sometimes they "steal" a second one, but who's counting?