Review of Santa's Dice Trove

Blurb from the publisher: 'May all your Christmas games be fun, and all your campaigns have a long run! Live a dream full of sunbeams and let the dice jingle all the way through your adventure times! Ho, ho, ho, critical hit!

This Santa's Dice Trove is our greatest idea to celebrate all that comes with Christmastide. Yours to unwrap: not only the limited holiday dice set of seven snowflakey beauties, but the matching dice bag too. Let the masterfully crafted work of Q Workshop's elves enchant you!'

What you get: Your EUR 35,67 or equivalent will buy you the Santa's Dice Trove, a limited edition Christmas-themed package that includes a set of seven plastic polyhedral dice in the standard variety any roleplayer expects (d4, d6, d8, two d10s (one in single digits and one counting tens), d12, d20), as well as a cloth bag.

The dice are of standard size, all of them having an approximate length of 2 cm. The background is green (pine green to be more accurate), while the engraved designs and numbers are white. The numbers are large, in a festive font, and are surrounded by small dots and snowflakes that emulate a Christmassy atmosphere. The top number has been substituted by traditional winter holiday images: a gift, a Santa Claus hood, a pine tree, a snowflake, and a bell.

The 11 x 11 cm rectangular cloth bag is red, and is adorned by differently designed snowflakes. It closes with strings that protrude from both sides of its mouth. It can store a lot more dice sets than the set this item contains. Bells are attached to both sides of it strings. You touch it? It jingles!

This is a limited edition item. Mine is marked as 578 / 600. I don't know whether it will can be found after these 600 pieces sell out. Probably nowhere.

The strong points: First I smirked. Then I laughed. This is brilliant! It is brilliant, in a weird, thrift-shop, novelty-item-idea-gone-wrong manner, where no matter what you do you can't get your mind of it. It's like those Christmas sweaters from the 1980s that make a comeback year after year. They are dreadful, yet they are always around.

The dice are wonderfully thematic, I have no clue however that game you would want to insert them in. Warhammer? Call of Cthulhu? No matter where you put them, and unless you are doing a holiday special, they will look funky. 'So why do you register this as a positive?' Because these dice don't care about whether they fit your game or not! This is a touch of Christmasmania, of this irresistible urge to insert useless red and green items all over your household in order to be festive. It took it a while to reach your games, yet it has finally done so, with the style (or lack thereof) that one would have expected. Think about it: you roll your d20, a festive bell comes up, critical hit, 'DEATH'S BELLS MOTHERFUCKERS!' Your roll your d12 for damage, a snowflake comes up, and... 'DIE BY MY SNOWFLAKE, BITCHES!' There is enormous entertainment value in that.

More seriously, these are great dice to roll instead of your game's standard dice. It is a pity that the set doesn't include a couple more six-siders in order to substitute the more common dice found in most board games, if you play board games with one six-sider however this is the exahedron to roll during Christmas. And new year's eve. And every day in-between. And in July, just because. Or the beginning of November, if you want to piss people off.

Even more seriously, the dice are very well designed. The numbers are crisp and visible from far away irrespective of suboptimal light conditions. The colours of the dice and the bag are a perfect thematic match. The green is deep but the red isn't so, lest it became too serious. Its slightly lighter tone makes it as kitschy as one would have expected such an item to be. For Christ's sakes, the dice bag jingles. Where will you ever find that?

Distinguishing between the 6s and the 9s is easy. Even the 10-sider, the usual trouble maker, hides the dots around the snow so that you don't have to judge only from the die's orientation.

Unless the dice come poorly manufactured, there aren't many flaws one can find on a set. There are no defects or imbalances when it comes to dice-rolling. I rolled each die around a hundred times, and even though the numbers obviously did not come out exactly as statistically expected, there is nothing to suggest that there are inherent flaws. If this is the one single set you have, it will perform its duties with ease.

The weak points: Read the strong points and reverse the thinking, honestly. Santa's Dice Trove is bad for the exact same reasons it's good. It's a kitschy novelty item that few will have the nerve to use during the summer... or at any time, now that I think of it. It's weird, isn't it? You are a no-nonsense badass if you bring these dice to the table, at the same however you a zero nobody with no sense of taste. Heh! I gave this a 5 for style because I get the joke; if you don't, the item is worth a 1. Literally.

One of my ten-siders has a minor design flaw, namely a discolouration in one of its sides. I am certain that this is a one-off and I don't mind. I would have however been very angry if I had bought this item as a gift...

...and even more so because of its price. EUR 35,67 just because the dice have a Christmas theme? Come on, that's not serious. I get the 'limited edition item' marketing schtick, yet this is a bit overboard.

Conclusion: Santa's Dice Trove is very likely to put a smile to your face, or to that of the gamer you love. An overpriced seasonal limited-edition item, it is one of these things that I feel as proud as I feel ashamed about owning and using. Wait till I roll these beauties in Easter, and I observe my players' faces while doing so. That's a luxury few gamers have.

To find out more about Q-Workshop take a look at http://www.q-workshop.com.

The Santa's Dice Trove can be found here.

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