Blank wooden polyhedral dice?

April 25, 2016 6:30 AM

Google has failed me. Looking for a place to buy blank wooden dice in a polyhedral set (d20, etc.). Should look like dice with rounded corners, not just blocks. Unfinished faces because I plan to draw on them. Reasonable balance/fairness, enough that you would be happy playing a casual game with them. Cheap and fast shipping to the US would be outstanding. I can find plastic easily but no wood.
posted by anaelith to Shopping (8 answers total)

So, this site features all kinds of interesting wooden polyhedral dice but they are admittedly kinda pricey. Sounds like you can customize them, so I'm assuming you could just get them blank. Not sure I see any with rounded corners, but perhaps I'm overlooking.
posted by bologna on wry at 7:26 AM on April 25, 2016

One potential solution here would be to buy a desirable wooden die and to re-finish/paint/sand/modify the faces in order to give you a quality drawing surface. Having the initial shape/balance is a pretty good head-start. Certainly better than trying to craft it from scratch...
posted by milqman at 8:01 AM on April 25, 2016 [3 favorites]

Best answer: This BoardGameGeek thread from a few years back is not encouraging; multiple posters note that cutting the wood at the angles required for dice (other than d6) requires rather specialized equipment, which reduces the chances that you're going to find someone mass-producing them.

(Oh, and the KickStarter mentioned in that thread is now the Artisan Dice website linked to by bologna on wry.)
posted by Johnny Assay at 8:03 AM on April 25, 2016 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Just chiming in as a more-skilled-than-average woodworker to say that decent wooden dice with rounded corners is kind of a tall order, and getting them at any price I'd think of as "cheap" is completely unrealistic. Even without the rounded corners, expect to pay a fair bit. If you do buy some that have sharper edges, it will be time-consuming but not too difficult to round the edges yourself with something like a nail file or sandpaper glued to a block.
posted by jon1270 at 9:09 AM on April 25, 2016

Is scanning the drawings and printing them onto stickers to apply onto dice an option for you?
posted by Candleman at 11:52 AM on April 25, 2016

You might be better off using some filler to fill the numbers on existing dice, then sand the faces, then prime (multiple light coats). Using a paint pen should allow you to draw on the dice.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 12:51 PM on April 25, 2016

Response by poster: Well, damn. Thanks, guys. I suspect my next question is going to be about how to draw on plastic dice. One of the reasons I wanted wood is because permanent ink (sharpie) just soaks right in so you don't have annoying peeling or chipping like stickers or paint.
posted by anaelith at 4:56 AM on April 26, 2016

There was a question that involved some answers about how to draw on plastic dice a few days ago.
posted by freezer cake at 2:16 PM on April 26, 2016