[HN Gopher] A review of dice that came with the white castle
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A review of dice that came with the white castle
Author : doener
Score : 120 points
Date : 2026-03-19 06:47 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (boardgamegeek.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (boardgamegeek.com)
| riffraff wrote:
| The thread following the review is pretty interesting too!
| bombcar wrote:
| This reminds me of a D&D dice website that went into way too much
| detail about how they weren't fair and I remember photos of them
| stacked on top of each other to show the variations in
| manufacturing.
| gilrain wrote:
| Zocchi retired, but his company charmingly continues.
|
| https://www.gamescience.com/about-1
|
| (Note: the sprue left by his sharp-edged process has since been
| proven to result in more bias than the tumbling undergone by
| the round-edged process.)
| rgoldste wrote:
| Reminds me of an encounter on BoardGameArena where the top ranked
| 7 Wonders Duel player complained there was a randomization bug
| (the Great Library never offered the science progress token). I
| thought he was raging (who hasn't heard a poker player complain
| about bad luck) but turns out the developer checked the code and
| did in fact find this was a bug!
| the_af wrote:
| I found this fascinating, if true:
|
| > _The reason casino dice have such sharp edges is to get the to
| stop rolling faster with fewer tumbling. The more a die tumbles
| the more likely it will present any issues with it._
|
| If I understand it correctly, the justification is this: if a die
| is biased (usually a heavier face), this bias will manifest with
| a higher chance the longer the die rolls. But if it stops
| abruptly, for whatever reason (bumping against the edge of the
| table, other dice, or having a shape that prevents longer roll
| time, like the casino dice) this bias will be less likely to
| manifest. Did I get this explanation right?
| Novosell wrote:
| That's how I understand it as well :)
| shortercode wrote:
| I have quite a few sets of dice for D&D, nearly all of which
| favour aesthetics over balance. But saying that I prefer to use
| simpler plastic with rounded edges at a table. Sharp edge dice
| stop very abruptly and tend to show bias based on how they were
| held. The same is true of metal dice which are heavier, and
| tend to land instead of roll. This isn't really the outcome you
| want.
| the_af wrote:
| Your explanation also makes sense. Why then do casinos prefer
| sharp edges? Casinos strive to remove skill as much as
| possible.
| brador wrote:
| They stop sooner so more rolls per hour. House edge locks
| in as rolls count increases.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| Casinos account for this. In craps, you are expected to
| throw the dice such that they hit and bounce off of the
| farthest wall at the opposite end of the table. They may
| allow a roll that made it past the mid point if you just
| flubbed it. A short roll will not count. Dice must also be
| thrown and must tumble, they can't slide.
| mmooss wrote:
| At least in some games, such as craps, IIRC casinos require the
| dice to bounce off the back wall of the rolling area.
| Animats wrote:
| > The reason casino dice have such sharp edges is to get the to
| stop rolling faster with fewer tumbling. The more a die tumbles
| the more likely it will present any issues with it.
|
| No, casino dice are flat-sided cubes because corner curvature
| could bias the result. Corner curvature is hard to measure.
| Cubical dice are easy to check for flatness and dimensions.
| Gambling regulators have specs for dice: 19mm, flat sides,
| translucent, balanced, with appropriate tolerances. Casinos
| usually use dice with serial numbers and logos. Casino dice
| come in a pack of 5 with all dice in the pack bearing the same
| serial, to detect substitutions.
|
| Here's a manufacturer of casino dice, with their specs.[1]
|
| [1] https://tcsjohnhuxley.com/product/certified-perfects-dice/
| fecal_henge wrote:
| Is a 155 throws enough to evaluate bias? Seems more times than
| I'd like to roll some dice, but not enough to gain enough
| measurement confidence. By what criteria is the person assigning
| the traffic light ratings? What about face coplanarity? Get this
| enthusiast in a metrology lab.!
| ekropotin wrote:
| Sounds like a very fun hack project to build - automatic dice
| evaluator.
| qskousen wrote:
| Wendell at level 1 techs built one for Steve of gamers nexus!
| It was interesting. I was going to link the video but
| couldn't find it, sorry.
| cl3misch wrote:
| No, it's much too low. OP shows Pearson's X^2 for their
| results, but that alone is meaningless. p-value would be the
| interesting metric. I haven't computed it (although we could
| from the results) but I expect it to be very high, i.e. it's
| likely to observe these results even with perfect dice.
| mmooss wrote:
| For role-playing game purposes - not for gambling or serious
| competition or encryption of your super-valuable secrets - there
| is a question of what sort of randomization is needed:
|
| * Truly random outcomes: Doesn't hurt
|
| * Psuedo-random outcomes: Good enough?
|
| * Unpredictable but unequally distributed outcomes: As long as
| nobody can know what will happen, is that sufficient?
|
| * Unknown outcomes: As long as the _players_ can 't predict the
| outcome, that's what counts. If the game manager can avoid bias
| somehow, why not have them pick the number? Even use family
| birthdays, old phone numbers, etc., like people do with
| passwords.
|
| All devices will output unequal distributions for most realistic
| N, and especially for shorter series. Games are played mostly in
| shorter series. Does it matter if, over the long run, the device
| outputs a perfectly equal distribution?
| pennomi wrote:
| Need a d10 roll? Just look at the last digit of the current
| second on your clock. Is it random? No, but it approximates
| randomness if you only make a roll sporadically.
| mmooss wrote:
| How is it not random?
| celsius1414 wrote:
| Use minutes if you need a D12 and are playing very slowly. ;)
| travisjungroth wrote:
| Wouldn't that be hours and really really slowly? Could do
| seconds mod 12 (or any other factor of 60, which is a lot).
| mmooss wrote:
| Use hundredths of a second on the stopwatch. With a
| little math, and throwing out invalid results, you can
| generate a random number in any range < 100.
|
| Though I do wonder if the hundredths are true or just for
| show. Maybe they're randomly chosen. :)
| exmadscientist wrote:
| Cute, but _dreadfully_ silly.
|
| The giveaway is the handling of uncertainty. That's too many
| decimal places for some of these measurements: 10um (0.01mm) is
| not reliably measurable by a cheapo caliper, and even trying to
| do it with a good caliper or micrometer, you'll find that
| everyday objects simply cannot be reliably straightforwardly
| measured with that level of precision. (You need cleaning
| procedures, standardized handling, standardized sampling, etc.)
| And quoting "4.1g (5.1% too heavy)" versus "4.0g (2.6% too
| heavy)" is just absurd: that last digit really doesn't mean much.
| So don't treat it like it does.
|
| For example, on my random first d6 at hand, I get 4.47g from my
| nice scale and somewhere between 14.82 and 14.85 mm on the first
| face dimension, depending on how I measure, from my Mitutoyo
| caliper. I have a micrometer in the shop, but you can see that
| it'd be pointless to go get it. The next two faces are (14.79 to
| 14.84) and (14.76 to 14.87), so it's consistently like this.
|
| Likewise, kh2 to five decimal places isn't terribly useful...
| especially since you haven't really described the test you're
| running....
|
| In general there's a lot of "look at me make measurements" here
| that might be impressive. There is very little "what is the true
| value of this measurement, and how well can we assert that", and
| simply not enough "is this the right thing to be measuring, and
| how much does that factor matter". That last one is critical: the
| actual weight of a die is, I think, not important at all. It's
| weight distribution that matters, so who cares about 0.1g of
| difference. Unless you're making a batch uniformity claim? But
| really this evidence just says more about your measuring
| equipment. And it's well known that different color resins,
| especially black, white, and red, are pretty differently loaded
| with pigments, so they have different properties. You can't just
| expect them to be the same, but the author seems surprised that
| they aren't.
|
| And then we get to "These dice are safe to use" without any real
| description of the criteria or threshold. I say "this report is
| not safe to use (for serious purposes)"!
|
| It's cute, it's a fun little minute to read on the internet this
| morning. But it's silly, and if my students back in the day or
| coworkers today sent it to me, they'd be getting red ink and
| remedial lectures in measurement uncertainty.
| yomismoaqui wrote:
| The "Warhammer toilet dice" came to my mind.
|
| A short video about what happened:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/shorts/4ekc9Xwynkc
| Loughla wrote:
| Cheating in Warhammer is both the bravest and dumbest thing to
| try. The people that play that are usually SUPER into the game
| and absolutely will call you out if there are any tells at all.
|
| Only MtG has a more rabid fan base, I think.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Dice aren't assigned to players in this game so even if they were
| ridiculously biased it wouldn't give any one player and
| advantage, even if you did roll them more than 3 times in the
| entire game.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| Yeah, I'm surprised this didn't get a low impact. If just
| setting initial board state isn't low, what is?
| zahlman wrote:
| It seems like not a great sign for the game design if dice will
| only be rolled a few times per game, but somehow you need 15 of
| them.
| comradesmith wrote:
| It's fun. You should try playing it instead of judging by
| heuristics.
| sowbug wrote:
| Just in case anyone else nerd-sniped themselves this morning...
| if things fall at the same rate in a vacuum, regardless of their
| mass, why does it matter if one side of a die is heavier than the
| rest? I didn't know, and I had to look it up.
|
| It's correct that a biased die will fall without bias. But when
| it hits the surface and starts tumbling, it tends to rotate
| around the center of gravity, which will be closer to the heavy
| side, and the die wants to end up in the orientation with the
| "lowest gravitational potential energy." If that term isn't part
| of your lexicon, then think of a Weebil toy.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I'm not sure how much of an effect it has, but dice aren't
| rolled in a vacuum. There is buoyancy from the air that can
| roll the dice heavy side down. Which is what the saline water
| test is testing.
| tylervigen wrote:
| Perhaps also worth noting that you generally shake the die
| before releasing it. Thus even if you drop it straight down
| through a vacuum, you would have done the center-of-mass-
| impacted-tumbling in your hands first.
| newobj wrote:
| how many mg of oil can accumulate on a die due to handling?
| ticulatedspline wrote:
| Seems a bit silly, aren't all pitted dice biased?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Is it silly? Yes.
|
| But still... I am in love with the people who are obsessed with
| minutae. The world ultimately runs on prime who care. Thise
| obsessed with patterns are first to notice when they break.
| Sometimes, that matters. The first ones to understand the US
| military was disappearing people in the War on Terror to other
| countries were plane-spotters, because you could disappear
| people but planes are too big to disappear.
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