Dice.
This is a board game, i’m going to need dice. They come with literally every board game imaginable. Should be easy right?
WRONG!
So the issue with using “Normal” dice in Darkstar tactics, is “normal” dice are numbered 1-6, and while that’s great for moving spaces around a board, it isn’t the clearest when we want to quickly see if an attack has “hit” or a defence has been “blocked”
There are a lot of games that use this limitation, as units have different Stats/Chances/etc. But the aim of this game is to cut complexity where it can, keep it simple where possible, so a child can easily understand.
Intuitively. for kids.
Numbers are out, how about WORDS!
So instead of numbers, how about words. lets say we want a dice that just says “HIT” and “MISS” and another dice that says “BLOCK” and umm “FAIL”? lets order up some blank white dice and grab a marker pen…
OK, so my handwriting aside, that looks….. Not great. and I smudged it.
Another option, I could print some tiny labels and stick them on
Yeah, still not screaming “Good neat job” and it was really fiddly, im not doing that (quick maths for a set of 16 dice) 96 times!
Next Option. Break out the trusty 3D Printer.
After a bit of googling, I found a site that lets you generate a 6 sided dice, with custom icons or text.
Here is the file ready for printing.
and here it is after being painted (it wasn’t easy to read in all the same colour)
We did use these dice for our first test play, and they worked. But they didn’t “Feel” right. whichever side printed at the bottom had a bobbly texture due to the build plate of the printer, the rest you could feel the print lines and paint texture. so unless i want to spend hours sanding, polishing, priming, painting, lacquering, etc (spoiler alert, i don’t) i’m going to need to go back to the drawing board.
OK, I give in, time to buy some custom dice. lets get online and find a shop that sells custom dice, there must be loads of them these days.
WRONG!
Couldn’t find a single affordable option. I either needed to order a few THOUSAND of them, or i had to get them in crazy colours, or only have one side customised, or take out a small loan per dice.
Maybe one day, if i get to produce this game big scale. but for now i’m still going to have to come up with another option for prototyping.
The right tool for the job
Among the many “crafty” tools that my wife has “encouraged” me to acquire over the years we have a small Laser engraver that we have used to burn little images and text onto various wooden boxes for the kids or for their teachers end of year present. Maybe i can use that somehow, I’m not sure if it can cut/etch/engrave into acrylic, but lets give it a go.
Drumroll please…….
If you squint, you can kinda see… Nothing, damn
A quick google search… My laser etcher cant do white, “facepalm”
WAIT! it cant do WHITE acrylic, but how about BLACK acrylic. When i ordered the White Dice, i also ordered Black. Maybe that will “absorb” the light better… Hold please.
BINGO, JACKPOT, SUCCESS!!!!!
Fill it with a bit of white acrylic paint… not too shabby.
Up the resolution a bit, change up the icon to something more Sci-fi, less “Archery target” do the other sides, and like 8-10 dice. time to scale up..
Etching all those dice individually would be a bit of a faff, so lets break out the 3D printer and see if i can fashion some sort of jig/holder. then i can do 4, no, 9 of the same side at the same time.
Then a few coats of cheap white acrylic paint to fill the gaps.
I’m really happy with that, a couple of cracks in the shield sides paint (i think the laser actually went too deep), maybe one or 2 that aren’t dead centre. A bit of tweaking and i think i can get these near perfect.
Maybe after this i can open my own custom dice shop on etsy.
As long as you only want black dice….