Help find a matching D20!

September 6, 2009 1:54 AM

My boyfriend has been looking for a while to find a D20 to match the rest of his dice. You can see a picture of the matchy ones and the offending, not-quite-matchy 20 here. When we first got the set he just picked them all out of a little jar on the store counter. When he asked about getting a matching 20, the lady working there said Chessex wasn't making them any more. We've of course done some looking around on the 'net, but without even knowing the name of the style, it's been tough. Thanks!
posted by kavasa to sports, hobbies, & recreation (11 comments total)

I don't know where you can get them, but the name of the style is Fire Elemental.
posted by headspace at 1:58 AM on September 6

The big manufacturers of dice are Chesex and Crystal Caste. One of those two companies will likely have what you are looking for.
posted by skewedoracle at 2:40 AM on September 6

I mean - I know they're Chessex dice. I also know they're of a style that's no longer being manufactured. The questions are:
1. What is the name of this Chessex style and,
2. Where and from whom does one obtain "out of print" styles?

Headspace - I googled "chessex fire elemental" and the only thing that turned up were speckled opaque D6s, not the swirly semi-translucent pink he's got. Do you have some of these dice yourself?
posted by kavasa at 3:37 AM on September 6

Possibly stupid question: Have you tried contacting Chessex directly, in the hopes that they might have one in a warehouse somewhere?
posted by Faint of Butt at 3:50 AM on September 6

Your dice look pretty orange in the photograph, are they very pink? Your profile says Sarasota FL, have you gone by PopComics down on 41? If the owners don't know, the game night customers will probably recognize it and might sell you one. Necronomicon in Tampa is coming up soon too, and I think Chessex has a table there. Might be worth dropping in to check it out if Chessex won't talk to you directly.
posted by Mouse Army at 5:29 AM on September 6

They are in fact very swirly pink dice. Sorry about the picture, it's hard to get too accurate with a digital snapshot cam and no technical knowledge. :/

We've been to both Pop and Dark Side, and they just kinda hauled out the chessex catalogue. Re: a con, we're actually moving to MN on the 7th (wheee, escape from Florida).

We'll probably try sending an email to Chessex.
posted by kavasa at 6:24 AM on September 6

Kavasa- I recognize them because I owned them. I had Fire, Air and Water back in the day. I didn't buy Earth because they looked like swirled poo. (The completionist in me still cries.) I bought my dice in the late 80s, early 90s, so they've probably been discontinued for a decade or more.
posted by headspace at 6:45 AM on September 6

Is this what you're looking for? (more here)
posted by moutonoir at 8:02 AM on September 6

Head - so you've got non-speckled dice that were sold as "fire elemental" a long-ass time ago, huh? 'Cuz yeah, the only ones I'm coming up with by that name using google are the ones mouton's getting: the orange speckled kind.

We're probably SOL barring some sort of intern at Chessex deciding she'll dig through mysteriously warehoused sets of decade-old dice. :p

Man. I wonder WTF they were doing in the jar 'o dice at the front counter of that place a year or two ago.
posted by kavasa at 9:00 AM on September 6

I'm a dice collector, so I feel compelled to help here. Unfortunately, I don't really have any great news for you.

I suspect your d20 does match, just that it's either worn out more, or it just didn't get as much "swirl" as its companions.

The Chessex magma vortex dice are fairly similar, but despite some coloration differences, you'll also notice that the font is different, with underlined 6s and 9s (instead of dotted) and a closed-top 4.

You can try to poke around dicecollector.com to see if he's got something like it (not for sale, just for identification), but I should warn you that while his collection is impressive, his web design skills were bad 15 years ago and they haven't changed much. I wasn't able to find any dice theme called "fire elemental" anywhere on the web, but if they stopped making them as long ago as headspace suggests, this may not mean anything.

Since you got them out of a jar of mismatched stuff, it's entirely possible that they are not Chessex dice. I did some digging around and I couldn't find anything out there that matches those dice exactly.

Almost none of the dice I've looked at even use a font like this. These dice are the only ones I could find with an open-topped 4 like this. Perhaps some very old Chessex dice used different numerals than they do now, but nothing I've looked at matches that.
posted by ErWenn at 10:07 AM on September 6

Hi! This is the aforementioned boyfriend.

@ErWenn, I appreciate the links. I don't think the D20 is just a worn/flawed match--I realize the image isn't ideal, but it's very different in person. If the woman behind the counter is to be believed, the D20 was from a set called... ice cream or cotton candy or something? It's sort of faintly-pink with white dusting.

The relevant dice seem to be a heavily-swirled mix of opaque white and translucent salmon-orange.

That said, the way they're numbered definitely doesn't match up with some of the more recent Chessex dice we've found, so you may be right that they're not actually from Chessex.

That said, I do like the Magma Vortex ones (I just wish they were a little more salmon-y) and appreciate the tip!
posted by kavasa at 12:26 PM on September 6