GameScience Recycled Dice

As we discussed in how dice are made, the dice are manufactured via plastic injection molding. This means that the product to come out of the manufacturer is a bunch of dice connected by a thin plastic gridwork, kind of like how plastic pieces used to come in old board games where we had to cut our pieces off the plastic. Dice are made the same way, and the dice are cut off the tree by the manufacturer. These plastic trees are then thrown away.

GameScience has been experimenting with reusing that plastic and has found that it’s just as good as using virgin plastic in terms of dice quality. Unfortunately you can’t just toss the plastic trees back into the machine: instead they have to go through an additional process to grind them back into the plastic pellets that go into the injection molding machines (and thus they actually cost a bit more, rather than costing less).

Aaron guessed that they should be able to sell the first of the recycled dice in June — they’re still working out the precise colors now (the dice will be a mix of existing colors). The big downside of the recycled dice, in my opinion, is that they plan to only sell them in the 12-dice “Zocchi pack” selections. This is all the standard D&D dice in a 7-dice set plus the odd-sized GameScience dice (d3, d5, d24, etc). This means you essentially have to buy a bunch of dice that, quite honestly, you’re probably never going to use in order to get the dice that you will be using at your game. Thus a pack of the recycled GameScience dice are probably going to cost you about $25.

Still, we can hope that if the recycled dice are at all popular perhaps GameScience will consider releasing them in the standard 7-dice sets that fits the needs of 95% of the gamers out there.