Honest Dice | Fall 2026 Limited Edition Collection

Limited Edition, Delivers to US in Time for Christmas!

I'm proud to launch my newest collection; a limited batch of hand-poured, sharp edge dice. They are packed with features, including mathematically balanced numbering, my Hex d4 design, and a larger than standard size. Their high-contrast numbers are easy to read, and my signature hexagon on the high number helps you find the dice you want quickly, while also adding excitement to your best rolls.

I'm most excited about the fact that you won't have to wait for months since these dice are already made! I plan to begin shipping about a week after the campaign ends, which means that the dice will be delivered in time for Christmas for US backers!

Backers #1 - 500 who pledge $49+ will receive a free 23mm Sparkling Lagoon d20! This is an exclusive color that will never be sold or made again. The only way to get one is as a bonus for your support. 

If you have backed any of my past 6 Kickstarter projects, your shipment of dice will include a free pin! I'm glad to see you again and this is my way of saying thank you for your ongoing support. 🙂

 If this is your first time backing one of my projects, or if you are a repeat backer but want more than one, these pins are also available as an add-on.

I was never satisfied with the tetrahedral d4, even though hurts my nerdy soul to criticize a Platonic solid. It doesn't roll very well and the tapered shape makes it difficult to pick up (not to mention the hazard to your feet!).

After many iterations I came up with a d4 design I call the Hex d4, which I absolutely love. It tumbles better, is easier to pick up, and looks gorgeous. Thousands of players around the world are using the Hex d4 and they tell me they love it!

Despite becoming mostly standard, the typical numbering layout of dice is not even close to being balanced. A balanced layout reduces the impact any physical bias will have on the average roll. After hundreds of hours writing and running programs to balance these layouts I'm delighted with the result. Have a look at the Mathematical Balancing section at the bottom of the page where I get into all the specifics. Also check out the Fairness Testing Data section where I describe my methods and the 15,000 rolls I did for testing.

PRISMATIC RAINBOW

GLACIAL RIVER

VEILED BORDERLANDS

CHARMING CORDIAL

UNSEEN PASSAGE

SANGUINE AMBER

MELODIC ZEPHYR

TIDEPOOL FOXFIRE

7x COLLECTIONS

All of the dice for this project are in the add-on section. 

Start by choosing the $1 reward called "Step 1: Select Your Dice". It is a $1 pledge that lets you access the add-on section where you can pick all your dice. That $1 will be applied to your shipping cost in the Pledge Manager after the project ends.

The reason that all the dice are in the add-on section is that they are all limited edition. The add-on section lets me limit the quantities and lets backers choose all the dice they want in one place. If you don't see the dice you want, they may have sold out. Sold out items appear at the very end of the add-on list.

You'll pick all the dice you want now in the add-on section. After the project ends, you will use the Pledge Manager to enter your shipping information and pay for shipping and taxes. In the Pledge Manager you will have the chance to change your dice selection. However, if you know you want different dice than what you pledged for, you should modify your pledge right away since some dice may sell out before the project ends.

Important notes about Pledge Over Time (paying in installments)

Pledge Over Time backers' dice will ship later. I can't ship until Kickstarter tells me  they collected the final installment. That will be 8-10 weeks after the Kickstarter ends. If you want the dice in time for Christmas, DO NOT use pledge over time.

Pledge Over Time backers can't modify their pledge, they have to cancel and pledge again to make changes. If a backer used Pledge Over Time and wanted to add more dice, after they cancel and go to re-pledge, an item they previously had may no longer be available if someone snapped it up right after they canceled. 

I guarantee 100% satisfaction for all my backers. If you change your mind before your reward ships, let me know and I will provide a full refund. If your reward arrives and you aren't fully satisfied for any reason, contact me and I will pay for the return shipping of your reward and issue a full refund as soon as I receive the return.

All dice come in an elegant case for storage and display! 

Imagine a d20 that has all blank faces except for one which you have written “20” on. How many ways could you finish numbering this die? You might be surprised to find out there are 40,548,366,802,944,000 possibilities.

Optimizing dice numbering layouts became a bit of a fascination for me as I spent hundreds of hours of programming and testing over the years. I started with 60-sided and 120-sided dice and now finally the standard 7 piece dice set. I am not a mathematician or a programmer but I love hard problems and this is the best I've found.

Most of you might not think much about the mathematical elegance of the numbers on your dice, but I feel compelled to tell you some details since I spent a truly unreasonable amount of time on it. 🤣

Comparing layouts

I am only going to go into detail about the d20 here (this is already going to be long), but I balanced all the dice in the dice set using similar methods. I will be comparing my d20 layout to the standard d20 layout and also the Magic-Numbered balanced d20 layout by The Dice Lab. It is an elegant layout and I include it here only to show how my approach differs from theirs. I’m a fan of The Dice Lab and if you are interested enough to read this I bet you will love their dice too so go check them out!

What does mathematically balanced mean?

The goal of mathematically balancing a die is to spread the numbers evenly across the die in order to avoid any areas with concentrations of high or low numbers. A die with a balanced layout will be more fair because any bias of the die to land on a face or group of faces more often will have a smaller impact on the mean roll than it would on a standard non-balanced layout.

To mathematically balance a die you consider groups of faces and measure the sum of their numbers. The optimal result is that all the groups have the same sum, though in most cases no such layout exists and the optimal result is the closest possible layout that does exist. I balanced my die using the groups of faces shown in the image below.

Half sum: The sum of the faces on one half of the die. On the d20 that is a center face, three adjacent faces that share an edge with the center face and 6 faces that share an edge with those faces. This is a total of 10 faces. There are 20 half sums on a d20. If all the half sums were the same the sum of each would be 105. After weeks of analysis I conclusively determined that a layout where all the halves sum to 105 does not exist. The optimal possible layout has 12 half sums of 105, 4 of 104 and 4 of 106.

Vertex sum: The sum of the faces that share a vertex. On a d20 there are 12 vertices and each has 5 faces that share that vertex. Thus there are 12 vertex sums on a d20. If all the vertex sums were the same the sum of each would be 52.5, which is not possible. The optimal possible layout has 6 vertex sums of 52 and 6 of 53.

Total Deviation: For a given type of sum (such as half sum) the total deviation is the sum of the differences of each sum from the optimal sum for that type. The optimal sum for a sum group is the mean of the die multiplied by the number of faces in the group (for half sum that is 10.5 x 10 = 105). If the total deviation is zero it means that all the sums are the same and equal the optimal sum.

Balancing the half sums was my first priority, followed by the vertex sums. I was able to achieve both the optimal possible half sum layout and a well balanced but not quite perfect vertex sum layout.

As you can imagine I was extremely pleased with this result. To my knowledge this is the first half sum optimized d20 ever created and I was ecstatic to achieve a vertex sum total deviation of only 12! I also made a couple of other improvements over the standard layout.

Down with the n+1 rule! It is a convention in dice making that the opposite faces of a die sum to the number of faces on the die plus 1. For example, on d20s if you add two opposite faces they will sum to 21. 1 will be opposite 20, 10 will be opposite 11.  After a great deal of pondering I have come to the conclusion that this is a tradition we should abandon for the sake of dice fairness.  It doesn't do anything to spread the numbers in a balanced way and it actually makes the impact of any weight bias worse. For example, if there is a weight imbalance on a die, it makes some faces more likely to come up. It will equally make the opposites of those faces less likely to come up.  If the 1 is opposite the 20, a weight imbalance that favors the 1 will also disfavor the 20. You will not only roll more 1s but also you will roll fewer 20s. If instead the 1 was opposite the 2, you would roll more 1s but fewer 2s. You can see that the second option would be far less impactful to the average of a set of rolls on this hypothetical die, while the n+1 convention would actually maximize the impact of the bias on the mean. With my numbering layouts I now put similar values opposite each other.

Why does it have to be so hard to tell the 6 and 9 apart?!  On the standard d20 layout the 6 is next to the 9. Not only that, but because one is written upside down in relation to the other they are the exact same shape with nothing to differentiate them except for a period or line. Have a look at a d10 and you'll see the same thing! It is a minor thing I suppose but it always drove me bananas. On these dice sets you can rest assured that the 6 and the 9 are never next to each other and it will be easier for you to instantly tell which one you rolled.

I rolled 15,000 times in total to see how my dice compare to other poured resin dice. I tested five d20s, three d6s and four d4s. I won't name the brands of the other dice. I'm in favor of transparency but I'm also not trying to throw shade at other dice makers. If you'd like an explanation of some of the math behind how to measure dice fairness, this page has a pretty concise overview.

I am using a conservative 99% confidence threshold to reject the hypothesis of fairness. That means any dice that failed had rolling data so biased that there is a less than 1% chance a fair die could have produced those rolls.

This table summarizes my results:

Honest Dice noticeably outperformed across all the tests. In all tests my dice had a lower chi-square test statistic than every other die I tested. All of the Honest Dice easily passed with results that were well within the range of what you would expect from a perfectly fair die.

I was shocked at how terribly so many of the other dice did. I tested 9 other dice with a total of 11,500 rolls. Fully 66.66% (6 of 9) of the other dice were rejected with over 99% confidence! Obviously 9 dice is far too small of a sample size to draw conclusions, but it doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the fairness of the other poured resin dice out there.

d20s

It's important when testing dice to use enough rolls to ensure meaningful results. I rolled each of the five d20s 2,000 times, for a total of 10,000 d20 rolls. I tested my d20 against four other poured resin, sharp edge d20s. I chose a mix of expensive and less expensive dice to test. Interestingly, the expensive dice didn't seem to fare particularly better than the inexpensive ones in these tests.

The Honest Dice d20 did well with a test statistic of 15.28, well within the range of results you would expect from a fair die. I was pretty shocked to see how badly the others performed. D20 #3 was the only one that passed with a test statistic of 26.34. D20 # 1, #2, and #4 all failed with test statistics of 38.22, 71.20, and 56.20 respectively. We can reject the hypothesis that each of the other three dice are fair with the following (approximate) level of confidence: d20 #1 rejected with 99.443% confidence, d20 #2 rejected with 99.9999942% confidence, d20 #4 rejected with 99.99848% confidence.

If those results are representative, it would imply that an appalling percentage of poured resin d20s on the market are badly biased. Four dice is a tiny sample size, and I hope that I was just unlucky to get so many biased dice in my testing, but the only way to find out would be to test more d20s and I was exhausted after 10,000 rolls!

Here are the frequency distributions and observed means. It's interesting that d20 #4 was brutally "unlucky"(biased) with so many nat 1s and d20 #1 was very "lucky" (biased) with so many nat 20s.

d6s

Next up is the d6s. I tested three d6s, the Honest Dice d6 and two other poured resin sharp edge d6s. I rolled each 1,000 times for a total of 3,000 rolls.

The Honest Dice d6 did well again with a test statistic of 6.44. d6 #2 was ok too with a test stat of 7.24. Actually, d6 #2 was the only die in any of these tests to have an observed mean closer to the optimal mean than my die in the category. In that instance, the difference of 0.011 between the observed means is negligible and both dice rolled very close to the optimal mean.

A quick note on fairness and means: When used in a strictly technical sense, "fairness" doesn't involve the mean. You could have a very biased d20 that rolled exclusively 1s and 20s with a perfect mean of 10.5. I include the mean since it matters for how players experience the dice, and is often what players are referring to when they talk about fairness. A d20 that is biased to roll 1s and 2s results in a low mean roll and feels extremely unfair. Another with the same degree of bias favoring 10s and 11s could have no effect on the mean roll, and players likely wouldn't even notice. Mathematically optimizing the layouts has the goal of minimizing the impact of bias on the mean.

d6 #1 had a terrible test statistic of 16.05. For that d6 we would reject the fairness hypothesis with a confidence of 99.33%.  Here are the d6 frequency distributions and observed means:

d4s

Last up are the d4s. I tested my Hex d4 design against two poured resin, tetrahedral d4s and one shard style d4. I don't think the shard d4 was poured resin (although it does have sharp edges), so I refer to it as the cast plastic shard d4. The fewer faces a die has the fewer rolls are required to have a statistically significant outcome. For d4s 500 is adequate, so I rolled each 500 times for a total of 2,000 rolls.

Like the other Honest Dice, the Hex d4 easily passed, with a test statistic of 2.29. The results for the other three d4s were pretty bleak. d4 #2 did fine with a test stat of 3.62. However, d4 #1 and the shard d4 both did very poorly with test statistics of 18.11 and 11.38 respectively. We can reject the hypothesis of fairness for d4 #1 with 99.96% confidence and we can reject the hypothesis of fairness for the shard d4 with 99.02% confidence.

There you go. 15,000 rolls with very surprising results. All the Honest Dice passed the 99% confidence test and two thirds of the other dice I tested failed. Can so many resin dice out there really be that bad? I hope not. The only way to get a clearer picture is with more data, but that will have to be for a future Kickstarter. 

I appreciate your support. You make it possible for me to create exciting new dice to join players on their adventures. Thank you.

Happy gaming,

David