I found myself working at Chessex Southwest at the time when the company was growing like Audrey 2 in Little Shop of Horrors and scaring the hell out of The Armory, Wargames West, and anyone else who was distributing games and game supplies at the regional (meaning, not national) level. Chessex had parlayed its success as a minor game accessories provider to actually selling games themselves. It started small, with Don Reents selling stuff out of the back of his van in the Bay Area, and became a major thing, nationwide, seemingly unstoppable thing. If you ever played on a vinyl Battlemat, or used Dragonskins on your hardcover books, or owned a set or two of Speckled dice, that’s all thanks to Chessex.
When I became a salesman for the company in the mid-1990s, Chessex was making a killing as a full line distributor, but they also were selling the hell out of dice. They first imported the “European style” dice from Denmark, and they were a great thing. Nice colors, rounded edges, with slightly retooled numbers that were easy to read. They also put the number at the top of the d4 instead of at the base of the triangular face. Little things like that.
These Euro-Dice were made out of urea, a dense, granular plastic that was primarily used to make toilet seats and other not-exciting thing. Urea is strong and impact resistant, and if you’ve ever dropped a Chessex d20 on a tiled floor, you’ve seen their “impact resistant” qualities first hand as the bounced hither and thither, often settling in the least accessible place in your house, like under the fridge.
Chessex Manufacturing, in Berkeley, Ca. Frazetta Representin’!
They make the dice by pouring the urea into molds, use heat and pressure to solidify it, and then strike the molds to get a set of dice. Those dice would all get dunked into a paint bucket, which filled the numbers up, and then they would dry on racks. After that, the painted dice are tumbled in what amounts to a giant rock polisher, which knocks the excess paint off and rounds the edges and points on the dice at the same time. The result is a clean-looking die with nice heft, polish and color.
Then the Danish manufacturer stumbled onto something; basically, you could put two different colors of urea together and make dice out of them, only the colors wouldn’t blend like play dough. They stayed separate, and when tumbled, took on a soft edge that looked like a robin’s egg. Speckled. With a little experimenting, that was the start of Speckled Dice. Chessex already had a good relationship with the dice manufacturer, and they locked him into an exclusive deal for several years—in other words, he wouldn’t sell Speckled dice to anyone but Chessex. And in return, Chessex would buy tons of those things and sell the hell out of them. And so we did.
There were other dice in the Chessex line of game accessories; the translucent dice, of course, were a staple. There were some glow-in-the-dark dice in three colors. There were some special swirly-looking dice we called “Marbelized” and other companies called other names. It didn’t really matter, because, you see, there are only a few companies that make dice. Good dice, I mean. The kind you can really use. There are several American companies that make casino dice, but they aren’t practical for role-playing, not really. And there are companies—mostly in China, but not always—that manufacture game components cheaply and they make cheap, lightweight dice that feel light and cheap and you wonder aloud why even include them in your product if they are going to be like that. If you ever got the d6 dice from a Heroclix starter set, you know what I’m talking about. It’s those shitty dice that made us go foraging through our old family board games for those nicer, slightly heavier dice that felt good in our hands.
That’s what the Euro-Dice brought to the table. They were available in a nice selection of primary colors, and a couple of inking variations on the numbers. So, they weren’t sexy or flashy, but what they lacked in pizzazz, they made up for in weight, heft, and feel. Chessex opaque dice were the best example of that. Koplow also used urea in their opaque colored dice, but their molds were slightly different (and, I think, slightly inferior). Koplow, to me, always looked like they just appropriated a bunch of math dice and repackaged them. It took them a while to realize gamers wanted sexier dice. That’s what made Chessex Speckled dice such a game-changer: they were the first real style innovation in the dice making world that wasn’t a manufacturing upgrade, such as retooling molds or finding a different kind of plastic treatment that would make swirls or sparkles.
From 1993 to 1997, Chessex released over fifty different and unique “colors” of Speckled dice and sold them all—easily millions of dice. Chessex speckled dice dominated the market and saturated it and salted the earth for any speckled dice to follow. Our Danish dice guy made a few speckled dice for tip-in components in a few Eurogames and later, of course, started doing special d20 dice on commission for D&D games and TSR games, and others as well. I recall Pacesetter games’ various boxed sets including opaque Urea d10 dice, which is where I first became aware of these Euro-dice with the rounded edges and the heavy feel. But there was a gap between the last Speckled dice set in 1997 and the first new set in 2001. There are a myriad of reasons for that, but one of them was that by the end of the original run, Speckled dice sales had slowed. There were only so many people out there to absorb the stock of dice being churned out.
Not only did I get to sell dice to retailers, I ended up helping to make them when I was transferred to Chessex Manufacturing in 1996. You find out how cheap (or expensive) things are; you have to think about stuff that you never considered as a consumer, such as packaging—those AMAC cubes, for example, and those tiny slips of paper that served as the label all cost money, as well. There were frustrations, like dealing with upper management who had one idea—and maybe not a very good one—and trying to navigate a way to say that without getting fired. I drank a lot in Berkeley, California. For medical reasons.
One of the most frustrating things about working at Chessex was the haphazard way that the Speckled dice came together. If you look at the first run of Limited Edition Speckled dice and compare it to the current line of Speckled dice, you’ll notice a couple of things right away. As pretty as some of the colors were in that original run, you couldn’t see the numbers for shit (see above). Also, half of the color combinations were white and another color. Or, in the case of Space, black with white speckles. The reverse? Dalmatian, which came out shortly thereafter.
More than one color had ink on the faces that matched one of the plastic colors on the dice, rendering the numbers situationally illegible. There was no design sense, no attempt at using color theory. It was just mishmashing random colors together to see what worked, from a team of two men, one of whom was not particularly artistically inclined, and the other of whom was a Danish Dice Gnome. That was our affectionate nickname for the dice manufacturer. It was most frequently invoked thusly:
We Called It: Floor Sweepings.
“Where did these big ass D6 Speckled dice come from?”
“Dunno. Jorgen made them and sent them over.”
“Did you ask for these?”
“No, he just sent them.”
“Oh, Jorgen, you wacky Danish Dice Gnome.”
The above line works best if you say it like a Leslie Knope “Oh Ann” compliment from Parks & Recreation. What was I talking about? Oh, yes. Specked dice and the making of same.
The chosen and appointed colors were then handed off to the production department (me and three other people) and we were told to “make it work.” I won’t go so far as to say we single-handedly saved Speckled dice from themselves, but…okay, we were a good-sized cog in the overall machine that saved Speckled dice from themselves.
It’s not that Speckled dice were doomed to failure, not at all. But they were being made with no planning, on the fly, trial and error. There were lessons to be learned from the first three sets of Speckled dice that were not being applied. We wanted to fix that, and make a concrete plan and chart a logical choice for going forward on future sets.
Weldon was in charge of Product Development and he wanted to create a master sample chart with dice, using black and white urea, that would be mixed 10% black, 90% white, and then another die that was 20/80, and then 30/70, and then 60/40, and then 50/50, 40/60, and so on, back to 90% black, 10% white. That way, we could see the concentration of material at a glance and calculate color combinations using these percentages. He wanted to build a color chart, using these and other tools. It would be super easy, once everything was organized, to plot out every color combination ever made and yet to be made in a single codified matrix.
All it would have taken was a couple of phone calls, or a face-to-face meeting, but for reasons known only to upper management (i.e. Don), the Danish Dice Gnome and Weldon were kept as far apart as possible. Our jobs, it turned out, was not Product Development and Editor-in-Chief, respectively. In reality, we were juicers, in charge of making lemonade out of lemons (and later on, squeezing blood from a turnip).
Tropical Para-Dice
Weldon was completely responsible for the success of the Tropical Para-Dice set. He named them, and gave those dice a purpose and a reason to exist. They were evocative and the names made sense with the color combination. We were handed a selection of colors—that is, mashed up urea dice already made–and told to “pick the six best ones.” Shaping the Limited Edition release into a cogent theme was a desperate attempt to get some control over the release of our Best-Selling Dice Product.
Weldon was the one who got our Danish Dice Gnome to use metallic ink on some of the dice to kick up the contrast on the dice faces. They were against it, and fought him on it, but he eventually got them to try it and you know what? They were a big hit. Thankfully, we were given latitude to name the dice ourselves. This was the best part of the job. It also ensured that none of the small, candy-like objects that were terrible choking hazards to begin with were named after food anymore. The legal department could cross that off of their to-do list.
Action Dice!
The Action Dice release came together in a different way. One day, Weldon was working in the warehouse, trying to invent products we could sell that wouldn’t be a huge outlay of cash. He came in and handed me a die and said, “What would you name that?”
It was hideous: mostly yellow but with an even ratio of black and red speckles, which made the yellow very dingy and dirty. I stared at it for a few seconds. “It kinda looks like an explosion, but contained inside the dice.”
“That’s pretty good,” said Weldon. “They were calling it ‘Vomit’ in the warehouse.
The Explosion dice were one of the colors that was produced some time between 1992 and 1995. They may have been included in the first versions of loose Pound-O-Dice, or maybe the loose samplers, but we don’t know, and I doubt anyone else does, either. Regardless, we had a whole pallet of them in the warehouse, and no effective way to sell them; they weren’t named, and didn’t have a stock number.
The next Limited Edition (aka “LE”) Speckled dice Sampler was already scheduled, so Weldon got out some of the dice that had previously been foisted on us. One of them was a striking purple and red and blue die they were calling “Bruise.” Weldon pointed out that wasn’t an attractive or particularly marketable name. We changed it to “Knockout” instead. The idea of dice based on action movies was born. Explosion, Knockout, and Getaway were colors already created. Loot, Gunmetal, and Ninja were created by us.
To better sell the idea, I tricked up a logo with our in-house graphic artist and we envisioned an ad for the dice that would be a photo montage of action-movie-type things. We also put the Action Dice logo on one of our velour dice bags. I’ve still got mine. It holds up, I think.
These two themed sets sold very well. The idea of doing Limited Edition sets, and letting the market dictate what colors to keep, was brilliant (to his credit, Don was very good at logistics). Retailers who bought a LE Loose Speckled Dice Sampler got their store listed in a giant ad that ran in The Dragon Magazine—still Ground Zero for gaming news in the mid-90s. Thanks to the full-page ads and the modicum of marketability we added to the project, everyone in the sales departments at the distribution level had no trouble moving them. The sets sold like hotcakes. Some of the colors sold out within a couple of weeks.
Celestial Dice
By the time the third quarter LE set was due, everyone had seen the value of what Weldon and the rest of us were capable of doing and so when Weldon requested dice samples based on the planetary colors, lo and behold, Don took the requests to Norway and got the Danish Dice Gnome to fire off some D20s for us to look at. It was something of a miracle at the time, because up until then, Reents and the Danish Dice Gnome were the only ones allowed to play with the Speckled dice color combinations. Weldon purposely asked for a few colors that were outside the range of Celestial Dice, because we didn’t know if we would get another chance to ask for samples.
The Celestial Dice were smart, brightly colored, high contrast, and true to the theme and the names (Weldon agonized over the actual colors of the planets, versus our popular misconception of those colors, and what do you name our planet since we already have Earth dice?) They are, in my opinion, the best Speckled dice release Chessex put out at that time. They were a sign of what we would have done, if they had only let us do more of it.
There were other sets, as well, stand-alone items that came out piecemeal, even though we tried like hell to make them more ordered and thus, meaningful. Reggae, Fourth of July, Valentine’s Day, and Halloween were all just sort of thrown out there, haphazardly. Weldon wanted to make those (and a few others) into a Holiday Sampler, which would give people dice to buy all year around. The color we were most excited about? Mardi Gras.
Another set I tried to get off the ground was Endangered Species. These were animal themed colors based on, you guessed it. The idea was to create some interest around the cause and donate a portion of the profits to The World Wildlife Fund. This also did not come to pass, and that’s a damn shame, because you would have loved the gorilla dice. Black and Brown with Gray numbers. It would have been sweet, so sweet. Working on the Limited Edition Speckled Dice was the most fun, and the fact that some of those colors are still around and considered fan-favorites, and nothing else I did for the company exists anymore, it was also the most rewarding. Oh, and one final thing: those of you who might have seen the ads in Dragon, looked at the retailers who were listed as sellers of Speckled Dice, and noticed that in Springfield, there appeared to be a store called The Android’s Dungeon, and wondered if it was a real store…it wasn’t. We were just really big Simpsons fans.
Note: parts of this post previously appeared on Confessions of a Reformed RPGer