Made a game where each player needs a dice block to play, thats 36 per player 216 total. Is that too cost prohibitive? I can get them for like $2.50 each (per block) and it would seem a company with more connections could get a better deal.
Any thoughts?
that is a lot of dice but you have a good deal so could you tell me were you found it
I would say it depends on the game. Just using your cost for example, $15 worth of dice in a light 15 minute game would seem like too many, but an epic 4 hour game that cost $80 is at the other end of the spectrum.
. . . like there must be a cheaper way to represent whatever information two-hundred-sixteen dice are being used to represent.
This might be a time for weighing coolness vs. cost, though I'm sure a chinese factory could spit out 216x 1000 dice for a much better price than buying them from a store.
Maybe if you posted what you were using the dice for, people could help come up with alternatives to having so many dice!
:)
The colored dice represent units in a Risk type game, I guess a publisher may choose to use something else entirely
Do the dice function as a means to randomize an event? Or are they simply manipulated to each side manually? Either way it seems to be excessive, and that a more elegant solution could be found. That said, it would be pretty cool to have a massively huge dice throwing cup for each player before throwing all 36 dies at once...
yes, probably- unless you will either be rolling that many dice at once, or unless you actually anticipate having 216 units on the board which all require some variable state represented by the dice, there is probably a way to do it more efficiently... both for play and for cost, since you're talking about $24 in production costs before rules, aids, boards, cards, or whatever else gets used, and before packaging and shipping, which, due to the huge quantity of dice, would probably cost you nearly the same as the dice cost themselves.
now, if they're absolutely necessary and the correct thing, by all means- but you're talking about a $80 - $100 game if sold from a website, and a $200 game sold from retail shops... which means almost no retail shops would carry it.
There are no variable stats, the dice represent the quantity of units on a space. One die with a 6 facing represents 6 units or Men. To be honest, having more than 40-50 units per player on the board at a time has proven very rare, and that can be represented by 10 dice or less. So all 36 dice per player are not required to represent units.
However
Combat in this game is resolved by rolling one 6 sided die per unit and counting up the six's as 'hits'. Rolling 20-30 Dice for this purpose is common. In order to reduce the required dice for the game I could:
Include 15 colored dice per player to represent his units.
and include 2 blocks (36) of misc dice for combat rolling. (Offence and Defence)
thats 162 dice
I guess it depends on what is cheaper for a company 6 little men or 1 small die.
the answer will be 6 cardboard chits most of the time (as a printed piece of chipboard only costs a few cents, will yield lots of chits, and the chits facilitate more fragmented units with lower components). additionally, it would be further more effective to determine odds for various quantities of dice and generate a "combat results table" (CRT) based on those odds, implemented in such a way that only a few dice are required for reference with the CRT. Those are the most common fixes to the component issue you present, so if you're looking to have a publisher pick up your game, i'd start researching there.
I really appreciate all the Input.
I believe that the answer will be cardboard Chits and a block for offence and defence. thats 72 dice for 8 bucks
as the game progresses every die you roll has an impact on the battle. Yea a 1 you roll may not count as a 'hit' but it may absorb enemy fire, or a 2 may not normally count as a hit but you have some technology that upgraded your units and now it does. Having more units in a battle not only means you last longer because you have more units for your opponent to take out but also the additional units add their fire to the count (die) and you have a better chance of hitting.
but $8 on dice is far more pracitcal.
Thanks!
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I misspoke it was $3.95 at fairplaygames.com
I guess the game could be played with fewer, but the colors indicate each player so a block was most cost efficent for me.