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We bought almost 700 for the upcoming tournament. Looked great last year. We're going with a different pattern of dice, same symbol this year. We liked them.

I've never had any issues with Chessex dice. I find them to be high quality and they are my preference choice for dice. Although, Chessex dice are not perfectly balanced, they are pretty close. Apparently by rounding the edges to save material during production it does alter the probability some. Someone wrote an excellent article about it, but I don't remember where I read it. The only near perfect dice are the square edged Vegas kind.

So what exactly do you mean by inconsistent? If dice consistently roll one specific number more than any other then they are out of balance.

I bought a new Chessex block for a tournament a month or so ago. Many people told me "they're horrible. THey roll 1s 30% of the time. Saw it on dakka (I was surprised to hear someone else talk about this in real life. Apparently this site isn't all a bunch of AIs in a bunker somewhere)."

I will say (after playing about 8 games with them) they feel fine to me. I rolled horribly sometimes, rolled amazingly other times, and overall everything came out about like I'd expect.

Barring a full scale rigorous test of each individual die in the block, I'm willing to say they meet my standards of randomness for tabletop gaming purposes.

Are Chessex dice only compatible with 40K?

Discarded them after 2 games and some testing, the quality is not wroth the skewed results and from personal expereince everybody who got chessex dice either don't actually use them any more or already just got them as memory pieces for events.

Amusingly enough, before I read this thread I had been searching the net for better dice. I, too, use Chessex dice (a set of 12mm and a set of 16mm), and I honestly suspect I roll more 6s than I should.
Sadly, precision dice in a useful size are hard to come by (19mm casino dice are plentiful and not too expensive, but too big to roll 10+ at a time). Smaller sizes of precision dice just don't seem to exist outside of custom orders (the once-popular gamescience dice are unavailable, it seems) or horrendously expensive backgammon dice ($30 for a PAIR ).
I did, however, find many favorable reviews of Koplow's square edged dice (not the razor edge of precision/casino, but not rounded, either), and just bought a block of them on Ebay.

My dice rolls are terrible not matter what kind of dice I use. I use chessex so at least my bad rolls look pretty lol.

I'm useing 12mm chessex blocks while on my stuff to be shipped from Germany. After rolling them for about a hour my results are average. My batch at least seems balanced.

People testing their dice...... That made my night, I needed a good laugh.

Do you know how many thousands and thousands of rolls would be required to determine if even one was out of balance? How many different throw styles would need to be tested? How consistent and meticulous it would have to be?

Then to do it with any decree of confidence..... Sheer hilarity.

I have a rare talent of being able to make any dice from any manufacturer consistently roll far more 1s than it should. Oh yea, except on leadership tests and casting psychic powers, I get plenty of 6s there.

Buy square cornered dice off ebay, they are a ton cheaper, you can get them in bulk, great quality and come in any size you like (12mm, 16mm, etc). The colors are a bit limited (white, ivory, black, red, green, blue, pink, purple, yellow), but they are outstanding.

No reported issues and a LOT of people still love and use the dice we gave them so we went back to the well BECAUSE of their satisfaction. Got frequent requests for more.

Now the new ones will be a new story so we'll see but as i mentioned, no complaints that I know of. We might try square ones next time just for variety.

Zagman wrote:Do you know how many thousands and thousands of rolls would be required to determine if even one was out of balance?

Well, here's an article on Forbes, and here's the one from dakka.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that you get what you pay for, and that a dice manufacturer that carves out pips rather than painting or gouge+refilling is going to create dice that are less balanced, if they have anything by means of quality assurance in the first place. The fact that so many people are constantly griping about chessex isn't proof that they're crappy, but it is a rather serious implication.

Personally, I burned through two chessex cubes before I finally gave up. My really wonky luck was recorded for my battle reports, and the moment that I switched over to dice that didn't cost bottom-of-barrel prices, it was shocking how much closer to statistically expected things got for me, instantly.

Yes, there's a chance that if you buy cheap dice, you might get nice dice, and yes, it's possible that everybody who has made the switch to something nicer is merely suffering from confirmation bias. But when you buy a cube of chessex and are one of the people they work poorly for (humorously the fact that they work well for some and not for others is a sign of their inconsistency), and you finally get fed up enough with them to buy some real dice that roll correctly and don't bias one face or another...

... well, we told you so.

Never had a problem with Chessex and have been using them for years. Seem to be fairly balanced, but the thousands and thousands of rolls is something I'm not wanton to do. Plus they look cool add in the fact that balance isn't perfect when you factor in if its being rolled or dropped, rolled flat or if it bounces against terrain, etc.

 Zagman wrote:
People testing their dice...... That made my night, I needed a good laugh.

Do you know how many thousands and thousands of rolls would be required to determine if even one was out of balance? How many different throw styles would need to be tested? How consistent and meticulous it would have to be?

Then to do it with any decree of confidence..... Sheer hilarity.

Not really no, several hundred tries with your rolling style(and you are the one who is rolling so different styles are irrelevant) and from the same height where you would be standing for your rolls like an average 40k table height (i know mad!! bear with me ) then you don't need to meticulously test it with different styles height and speed. If your regular rolling makes it turn 200 1 's in only a 500 hundred sample size that's enough indication for me.

Ailaros wrote:

Zagman wrote:Do you know how many thousands and thousands of rolls would be required to determine if even one was out of balance?

Well, here's an article on Forbes, and here's the one from dakka.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that you get what you pay for, and that a dice manufacturer that carves out pips rather than painting or gouge+refilling is going to create dice that are less balanced, if they have anything by means of quality assurance in the first place. The fact that so many people are constantly griping about chessex isn't proof that they're crappy, but it is a rather serious implication.

Personally, I burned through two chessex cubes before I finally gave up. My really wonky luck was recorded for my battle reports, and the moment that I switched over to dice that didn't cost bottom-of-barrel prices, it was shocking how much closer to statistically expected things got for me, instantly.

Yes, there's a chance that if you buy cheap dice, you might get nice dice, and yes, it's possible that everybody who has made the switch to something nicer is merely suffering from confirmation bias. But when you buy a cube of chessex and are one of the people they work poorly for (humorously the fact that they work well for some and not for others is a sign of their inconsistency), and you finally get fed up enough with them to buy some real dice that roll correctly and don't bias one face or another...

... well, we told you so.

So, we end up with a strong argument that no die is balanced. That was thousands of rolls with a single D20, not an entire six sided cube. My point is that no one could truly know if their cube is worse than another and anyone telling you otherwise is simply wrong and imagining the difference.

pizzaguardian wrote:

 Zagman wrote:
People testing their dice...... That made my night, I needed a good laugh.

Do you know how many thousands and thousands of rolls would be required to determine if even one was out of balance? How many different throw styles would need to be tested? How consistent and meticulous it would have to be?

Then to do it with any decree of confidence..... Sheer hilarity.

Not really no, several hundred tries with your rolling style(and you are the one who is rolling so different styles are irrelevant) and from the same height where you would be standing for your rolls like an average 40k table height (i know mad!! bear with me ) then you don't need to meticulously test it with different styles height and speed. If your regular rolling makes it turn 200 1 's in only a 500 hundred sample size that's enough indication for me.

Yes, really yes. A few hundred rolls may be enough for you, buts it's not enough for scientific or mathematical evidence. All it proves is that you are gullible enough to believe it. 200 1s in 500.... Nicely made up. Firstly, it's entirely possible to roll that, highly unlikely but possible. Secondly, I doubt you've ever encountered any that did that.

This is pure wild exaggeration. I've been Wargaming for over a decade and amazingly dice get blamed for everything. The two best players in our are constantly get blamed for having dice that roll above average.... Except when it counts and the worse players are always blaming their dice regardless of which dice either are using. In this example, people do not want to attribute the difference in succes to skill, tactics, or list buildig but blame dice, because they are random.


Also, if the pitting causes such a huge difference, good thing they come 36 to a cube and everyne I've ever played against have been using them too. Except one guy I know rocks casino dice, ironically they rolled terrible... Which is entirely within the realm of possibility for a smallish(few hundred rolls) or colored by it being key rolls which came up poor.


People are a biased and superstitious lot.

 Zagman wrote:
People testing their dice...... That made my night, I needed a good laugh.

Do you know how many thousands and thousands of rolls would be required to determine if even one was out of balance? How many different throw styles would need to be tested? How consistent and meticulous it would have to be?

Then to do it with any decree of confidence..... Sheer hilarity.

The Dakka test rolled 4 sets of 36 dice 1000 times for 144,000 rolls in total.

The chance of any single number (say 1's) coming up is 16.67%. So if you roll 1,000 times, you expect ~166 to be to be 1's. Roll 100,000 times and you expect ~16,666 to be 1's.

Dice rolling is a binomial distribution, but for very large numbers of tests, it is well approximated by a normal distribution. This thing does the calcs for you, so I'm trusting it's accurate:

http://stattrek.com/online-calculator/binomial.aspx

If you roll 100,000 times and the dice are perfectly balanced, the chance of being more than 0.6% away from 16.667% is only ~1%, the chance of being 0.8% away from 16.667% is less than 0.1%.

So if you roll a set of dice and add up the results of 144,000 rolls and find you get 29% 1's... yeah, statistically that is very significant. The chance of that happening with unbiased dice is so close to 0 that you'd be crazy to not think it's significant.

Even if you only rolled 1000 dice, the chance of rolling outside of the 140-200 window (remembering 166 is the average) is only 1.2%. So if you rolled 1000 dice and 290 came up 1's, yeah, I'd say that statistically speaking there's a pretty darned good chance that there's a bias in the dice. The chance of rolling outside of a 100-250 window on 1000 dice is tiny assuming your dice are unbiased, so if you test it and you do roll outside that window, the more likely thing is your dice are biased rather than you just fluked a lot of 1's.

You're more likely to pick up 7 random unbiased dice and roll 7 1's in a row than you are to pick up 1000 dice and roll 1's outside of the 100-250 window.

Feel free to check my maths, I'm just assuming that calculator is giving me the correct probabilities and I'm basing my assumptions on that.

EDIT: Doh, misread the article, it was only 36,000 rolls per set, my bad, but the chances of getting anywhere near 29% 1's is still so tiny that IMO it's statistically significant.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 Zagman wrote:
People testing their dice...... That made my night, I needed a good laugh.

Do you know how many thousands and thousands of rolls would be required to determine if even one was out of balance? How many different throw styles would need to be tested? How consistent and meticulous it would have to be?

Then to do it with any decree of confidence..... Sheer hilarity.

The Dakka test rolled 4 sets of 36 dice 1000 times for 144,000 rolls in total.

The chance of any single number (say 1's) coming up is 16.67%. So if you roll 1,000 times, you expect ~166 to be to be 1's. Roll 100,000 times and you expect ~16,666 to be 1's.

Dice rolling is a binomial distribution, but for very large numbers of tests, it is well approximated by a normal distribution. This thing does the calcs for you, so I'm trusting it's accurate:

http://stattrek.com/online-calculator/binomial.aspx

If you roll 100,000 times and the dice are perfectly balanced, the chance of being more than 0.6% away from 16.667% is only ~1%, the chance of being 0.8% away from 16.667% is less than 0.1%.

So if you roll a set of dice and add up the results of 144,000 rolls and find you get 29% 1's... yeah, statistically that is very significant. The chance of that happening with unbiased dice is so close to 0 that you'd be crazy to not think it's significant.

Even if you only rolled 1000 dice, the chance of rolling outside of the 140-200 window (remembering 166 is the average) is only 1.2%. So if you rolled 1000 dice and 290 came up 1's, yeah, I'd say that statistically speaking there's a pretty darned good chance that there's a bias in the dice. The chance of rolling outside of a 100-250 window on 1000 dice is tiny assuming your dice are unbiased, so if you test it and you do roll outside that window, the more likely thing is your dice are biased rather than you just fluked a lot of 1's.

You're more likely to pick up 7 random unbiased dice and roll 7 1's in a row than you are to pick up 1000 dice and roll 1's outside of the 100-250 window.

Feel free to check my maths, I'm just assuming that calculator is giving me the correct probabilities and I'm basing my assumptions on that.

EDIT: Doh, misread the article, it was only 36,000 rolls per set, my bad, but the chances of getting anywhere near 29% 1's is still so tiny that IMO it's statistically significant.

And as cool as that data is, it isn't very applicable to what we were going to see on the gaming table. If nearly 30% of roll came up 1s we'd know. That is not the case on average on the gaming table.

There is much we don't know about that study. How was each dice held, what orientation? Were the dice rolled the same way by hand? What was the coefficient of restitution in relation to the table?

All we know, is that when each die was rolled 1000 times by a particular individual on a particular substance we see such a distribution and can reasonably believe that it is indeed the case.

But, how does the data differ on different surface, especially uneven and softer surfaces commonly used for gaming. How does rolling large handfuls of dice on these surfaces affect results? As soon as variables are added such as different surfaces, uneven surfaces especially those with small bumps, and obstacles such as terrain and other dice are involved result will normalize to a significant degree or at the least invalidate the precision of such studies.

My best guess is that under those varying circumstances we'll end up with a much more normalized distribution, just as forcing someone to roll against a wall on a craps table does. The supplied theories are indeed interesting, but rely on clinical precision to be valid and the reasons for the dice behaving in such a manor are likely to be affected to a high degree by uneven surfaces or during normal gaming. Any anything that differs from clinical precision is going to reduce any predictability in the results.




And the most important part, everyone I've encounter during Wargaming are using the same kinds of dice from the same manufacturers and therefore any effect the dice may be having is irrelevant. Sure, there was one guy using precision dice, but he isn't beating me nor rolling any less polar to a significant enough degree to be noticed.

Whoops... there doesn't seem to be anything here.

I saw some blocks of Koplow square cornered dice for a good price. Can anyone attest to their quality?

So Zagman, needs more study?

 Sillycybin wrote:
Anyone suggesting casino dice needs to realize that they refresh those dice often. If you buy a set of casino dice for their probability accuracy this effect will be lost in a month. Those dice arn't meant to be colliding with anything other than a velvet surface.

They're also designed to be literally thrown down the table, not rolled. If you want precision dice that can be rolled, you want precision backgammon dice like these.

Toofast wrote:
I have a rare talent of being able to make any dice from any manufacturer consistently roll far more 1s than it should. Oh yea, except on leadership tests and casting psychic powers, I get plenty of 6s there.

LOL, same as me.

Davor wrote:

Toofast wrote:
I have a rare talent of being able to make any dice from any manufacturer consistently roll far more 1s than it should. Oh yea, except on leadership tests and casting psychic powers, I get plenty of 6s there.

LOL, same as me.

The weird thing is, I seem to be able to pass it on to other people. (I'mma see if I can channel it down the interwebs to all those hyperaccurate precision dice)

But, of course, that's just silly superstition. My crappy gaming results are really all because of the dice. I have some chessex D4s - I'm off now to burn down my dice bag. But before I do, semi-seriously: if one of the problems is the holes created for the pips, shouldn't the lightest 6 result end up on top most of the time? What about numerical dice? What's the game-destroying difference in weight between a carved-out 1 and a carved-out 6? If people consistently rolled more 6s, would there be as much grumbling and as many dice-replacement programs?

 pizzaguardian wrote:
So Zagman, needs more study?

More study is always good. So far all that has been shown is the cheaper dice have issues in a clinical setting. In a situation with an impossible number of extra variable and the vast majority of players are fielding the same exact quality of dice that it doesn't matter, and I'll postulate the difference in dice diminishes greatly. The softer and more uneven the surface the lower the importance placed on momentum and spin of the dice and how it is influenced by the rounded edges and the removed material weight difference. The more variable and softer the surface the lower any inherent difference in the dice will become, at least in practical theory.

But, if you feel poor dice make poor players when every player is suffering from the same handicap, then I won't dissuade you.



But, despite the academic discussion, spending extra money on precision dice that you knowingly believe to roll better or can demonstrate roll better than everyone else's dice is another simple form of cheating and no different that using loaded dice. It actually is using loaded dice, just loaded in comparison to the dice your opponents field.

If you know Chessex dice are crap and roll worse than precision dice, and you knowingly field precision dice for that exact reason or worse choose certain dice for certain situations, you are knowingly cheating. Knowingly cheating by creating an unfair and one sided advantage,

Giving yourself an unfair advantage over your opponents, especially at a statistical level, is cheating. I couldn't knowingly do it, I'll gladly play with the same handicap as my opponent.

 Zagman wrote:

 pizzaguardian wrote:
So Zagman, needs more study?

More study is always good. So far all that has been shown is the cheaper dice have issues in a clinical setting. In a situation with an impossible number of extra variable and the vast majority of players are fielding the same exact quality of dice that it doesn't matter, and I'll postulate the difference in dice diminishes greatly. The softer and more uneven the surface the lower the importance placed on momentum and spin of the dice and how it is influenced by the rounded edges and the removed material weight difference. The more variable and softer the surface the lower any inherent difference in the dice will become, at least in practical theory.

But, if you feel poor dice make poor players when every player is suffering from the same handicap, then I won't dissuade you.



But, despite the academic discussion, spending extra money on precision dice that you knowingly believe to roll better or can demonstrate roll better than everyone else's dice is another simple form of cheating and no different that using loaded dice. It actually is using loaded dice, just loaded in comparison to the dice your opponents field.

If you know Chessex dice are crap and roll worse than precision dice, and you knowingly field precision dice for that exact reason or worse choose certain dice for certain situations, you are knowingly cheating. Knowingly cheating by creating an unfair and one sided advantage,

Giving yourself an unfair advantage over your opponents, especially at a statistical level, is cheating. I couldn't knowingly do it, I'll gladly play with the same handicap as my opponent.

Wait wait so trying to get dice that gets averagely 16.6% on every result of d6 is cheating?

And lets elaborate , if i get some precision dice to a game and tell you that " hey these dice are precision dice lets use these" make me a cheater?

I am really having a hard time understanding you that somehow trying to get average results in cheating?

And also what if my opponent is incistent or using their dice even after i tell them their dice might not put average results will i become a cheater then?

Somehow i am a cheater in your eyes for trying to get average results, or even worse not playing with dice that doesn't give you average results is cheating as well.

Nobody here is trying to get "roll better" in this thread as far as i can see. But trying to defend bad dice, wherever its from; just because somehow getting average results in d6 (which i hope the game is designed for the average result and not bad dice, which doesnt mean rolling just ones it means rolling not averagely on every result) makes somebody a cheater and we should all be playing with skewed results is beyond reason.

Zagman wrote:More study is always good. So far all that has been shown is the cheaper dice have issues in a clinical setting. In a situation with an impossible number of extra variable and the vast majority of players are fielding the same exact quality of dice that it doesn't matter, and I'll postulate the difference in dice diminishes greatly.

The difficulty of establishing rigor means that all dice are of equal quality?

Let's try this again. How about you prove that chessex are just as good as Zontic or Game Science.

Random Dude wrote:I saw some blocks of Koplow square cornered dice for a good price. Can anyone attest to their quality?

I use koplow for my general lots-of-dice rolls, and they seem to work fine.

 Zagman wrote:

 pizzaguardian wrote:
So Zagman, needs more study?

More study is always good. So far all that has been shown is the cheaper dice have issues in a clinical setting. In a situation with an impossible number of extra variable and the vast majority of players are fielding the same exact quality of dice that it doesn't matter, and I'll postulate the difference in dice diminishes greatly. The softer and more uneven the surface the lower the importance placed on momentum and spin of the dice and how it is influenced by the rounded edges and the removed material weight difference. The more variable and softer the surface the lower any inherent difference in the dice will become, at least in practical theory.

But, if you feel poor dice make poor players when every player is suffering from the same handicap, then I won't dissuade you.



But, despite the academic discussion, spending extra money on precision dice that you knowingly believe to roll better or can demonstrate roll better than everyone else's dice is another simple form of cheating and no different that using loaded dice. It actually is using loaded dice, just loaded in comparison to the dice your opponents field.

If you know Chessex dice are crap and roll worse than precision dice, and you knowingly field precision dice for that exact reason or worse choose certain dice for certain situations, you are knowingly cheating. Knowingly cheating by creating an unfair and one sided advantage,

Giving yourself an unfair advantage over your opponents, especially at a statistical level, is cheating. I couldn't knowingly do it, I'll gladly play with the same handicap as my opponent.

Seriously?....wait, no, seriously? So, in a game that uses dice EXPLICITLY, me getting FAIR dice is cheating? That's stupid. If my opponent wanted to go out, blow money on "precision dice" and use them for our game, I would gladly let him. It's just a game, with, for me, no money being at stake.

As much as 40k is a game of chance, using precision dice will nott ultimately swing the game in his favor. Guess what? If you have precision dice and a crappy list, you'll still get beat, no matter how fairly your dice roll. Come on, dude.

Never had a problem with chessex dice, they are highly recommended at my FLGS.

Personally at home I use the GW cube dice because they were cheap for a lot of dice.

A lot of people moan about them but I have found some nights I roll all 1's other nights I can't stop hitting 6's ie it's all chance!