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.
Chessex Frosted dice in the old German mould in Blue, Purple and Caribbean Blue. Most people think of the modern Chessex mould when we talk about Chessex Frosted dice, right?
A Chessex Nebula Black d4 in the old German mould. Compared to the newer mould, the black material also looks a lot more distinctly black than the newer versions, which tend to look more greyish-purple than black. Chessex also produced other Nebula colours in this mould, for instance Nebula Purple and the old Nebula Red.
Speaking of Nebula Purple and Red… With the exception of the percentile die, we usually only ever see Nebula Purple and Red w/white in Chessex’s old acrylic mould. I lucked into a modern mould Nebula Purple and Nebula Red d6, which I definitely consider oddities.
(That said, I’m still looking for an old mould Nebula Purple d6, so if you have one and want to trade it, feel free to shoot me a message.)
Two Chessex translucents with gold ink in their old German d12 mould. The blue colour is the same shade of blue as used for the Translucent Blue w/white set in this mould. The purple d12 is probably the base colour they used for the Frosted Purple line, might be similar to the Lab Dice Series 7 Translucent Lavender set that will be released in the second half of 2023.
A bunch of old German acrylic mould translucent neon dice. My camera isn’t good with orange colours, so trust me when I say these are indeed a bright neon orange. The one in the back is a more pink-ish shade and the yellow one is neon yellow.
Chessex Speckled d20s (regular size, not the 34mm!) in an unusual older mould with a tiny font (Barracuda and Cobalt on the right), compared to the more regular mould counterparts (on the left).
It’s believed this is a mould that was used even before the one seen in older sets (the one that has dots next to the 6 and 9). This one with the tiny font has the 6 and 9 underlined.
A blue Chessex Opaque set with a bottom-read d4 that uses the proprietary Chessex font. I made a separate post about these, they date back to the early 1990’s. Even though it looks more blue than purple, the base colour of the dice is the same as that used in Chessex Opaque Purple w/red.
Not necessarily a mould oddity, but these were purchased from The Dice Shop Online and labelled D&G Opaque Blue d12 unfinished production sprue, which is interesting because they look like acrylic dice and they use the modern Chessex mould, but Chessex gets all their opaque dice from the urea factory Denmark and not from D&G (with the odd exception of acrylic opaques for PoDs from the German factory). Up until 2018, D&G produced the Chessex Translucent dice in this mould, so likely they made these with that mould for whatever purpose.