Critical Fail 🎲

Mar 06 2024

Oddball Dice #2 – Chessex Mould Oddities

By TeeJay

For the next two weeks, I will make daily posts where I’ll spotlight unusual or lesser known dice that I have in my collection that I hope are interesting for everyone to see and learn about. Each day I’ll cover a different theme, I hope you enjoy this series.

Unusual Chessex Mould Oddities

Perhaps “oddities” is the wrong word for these, since most aren’t all that odd, they’re just not the moulds we’re used to seeing and that we think of when we talk about these dice.

oddities, one-offs, rare dice

Mar 05 2024

Oddball Dice #1 – Off-Colour Oddities

By TeeJay

For the next two or so weeks, I will make posts where I’ll spotlight unusual or lesser known dice I have in my collection that I hope are interesting for everyone to see and learn about. I will try to cover a different theme each day, I hope you enjoy this series.

Off-Colour Oddities

Sometimes it happens that dice come out in a way that wasn’t intended, be it wrongly coloured material, an odd material mix, unintended abnormalities in clarity or opaqueness or just… strange things that aren’t supposed to be that way.

oddities, one-offs, rare dice

Jan 18 2024

Final Names for the Chessex Pound-O-Dice 2023 Sets

By TeeJay

The names for the exclusive sets that are distributed in the little brown envelopes together with the Chessex PoDs get voted on in a Speckled Collectors group on Facebook every time they release new sets. Below are the names for the current run that are now in circulation.

Nov 01 2023

Dice History – The Danish Edition

By TeeJay

I recently came across a dice set on a second hand platform that caught my eye, because it looked like the Chessex Opaque urea dice out of the Danish Dan-Tern factory, but it curiously had a bottom-read d4 in a mould I had never seen before. My curiosity piqued, I went ahead and purchased said set.

Feb 25 2023

Reference Guide: Ancient & Gold Mist

By TeeJay

I recently wrote a post on why the Ancient vs. Gold Mist names that collectors differentiate are actually a myth, but nonetheless is it useful to have this distinction in the dice collecting community. In a nutshell, collectors now differentiate between the somewhat darker and swirlier Ancient variant and the lighter and more misty Gold Mist variant of these dice.

ancient, crystal caste, d&g, dice & games, dice id, dice identification, gold mist, id, id guide, identification

Feb 25 2023

The Idiosyncrasies of Dice Naming

By TeeJay

If you’ve been in the dice collecting community for a while, you might know that collectors sometimes give things names in order to tell certain dice apart that may look very similar or just to have a name for something specific that wasn’t quite disguished in that way by the company who made the dice.

ancient, duo, gold mist, highlighter, magma, marble, naming, product information, rainbow, silk, spectrum, two toned

Jun 22 2021

Vox Machina – The Polyset Edition

By TeeJay

Like some people before me, I embarked on a quest to make my Critical Role Vox Machina d20s into full sets, trying to find existing polysets that matched the designs of the d20s. And let me tell you, it’s not been very easy.

critical role, critrole, critters, d20s, dice, vox machina

Jun 16 2021

Dice IDing and where to start

By TeeJay

The Basics

This blog post is mostly aimed at people who are newer to dice collecting and are looking for more basic information. Call it a starter guide. 🙂

common mistakes, dice id, id, id guide, identification, resource, resources

Feb 14 2021

European Discoveries in Deinking

By TeeJay

As some of you may know, the deinking method of choice in the US is using the degreasing cleaning agent LA Awesome and just soaking the dice in it undiluted for a few days. However, us folks in other countries don’t have easy access to LA Awesome, so some people have tried and tested other locally available products.

As a German, I’ve struggled with finding something will work as well as LA Awesome, and I have finally made a breakthrough that I would like to share.

brudex, deink, deinking, europe, la awesome, reink, reinking, tenzi, unink, uninking

Jan 24 2021

Dice ID Guide: Swirly Orange Dice

By TeeJay

In this blog entry, I’d like to point the spotlight at orange dice with swirls, particularly the Chessex Vortex Orange and Vortex Magma lines, as well as Crystal Case Silk Orange, which all look very similar.

chessex, crystal caste, dice id, dice identification, id, id guide, identification, magma, orange, silk, vortex

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