Dice look like a commodity and behave like a component. The difference between a good custom die and a poor one is almost entirely in construction, and none of it is visible in a product photograph.

This guide covers the four choices you have to make and the two details worth insisting on regardless of which way you go.

Material comes first

Injection-moulded plastic for volume and full-colour print. Cast resin for seven-piece polyhedral sets, where swirls and layered pours are the selling point. Solid hardwood for premium editions that get left out on a table. Die-cast metal where weight is the pitch. Foam for anything oversized. Machined acetate where fairness has to be provable.

Each is right somewhere and wrong everywhere else. The most common mistake is buying metal for a component that ships inside a box, where the cost lands on the game rather than on a customer who wanted it.

Size changes the object more than you expect

16mm is the board game standard and the right size when dice ship inside a box with other components. 19mm is noticeably better in the hand, reads across a table, and photographs far better — which matters enormously on a crowdfunding page.

Oversized foam at 100mm and up is a different product entirely: a prop rather than a component, bought because it gets picked up.

Custom face sets cost the same as one face

Setup is per die, not per face. Once you are paying to customise a die at all, replacing all six faces costs nothing extra, and it is where branded dice stop being decoration and start being useful.

Prize names, drink categories, exercises, discussion prompts, product ranges, your own icon set. If the faces are doing a job, people keep the die.

Detail one: recess-filled printing

A printed face can have the colour sitting on the surface or filled down into a recess. Surface print polishes off — a year in a dice bag and the pips are ghosts. Recess fill sits below the surface where nothing rubs it.

Ask which one you are getting. It is the single biggest determinant of how a printed die looks after real use and it costs almost nothing.

Detail two: what makes a die actually fair

Standard dice are moulded and tumbled, which rounds corners, and their pips are drilled hollows. Both bias the roll. A six face missing six pips of material is measurably lighter than a one face missing one.

Precision dice fix both: razor edges machined square, and every pip filled flush with density-matched material. If fairness is part of what you are selling, nothing short of that is honest.

Colour, and why we send physical samples

Solid printed colours match a reference reliably. Resin swirls, glitter suspensions and layered pours do not, because no two pours are identical — that variation is the product.

Any supplier who approves a resin colourway from a render is setting you up for a surprise. We send a physical sample and would rather lose two weeks than ship ten thousand of the wrong thing.

What to send us

Your artwork, the material you are leaning toward, the size, roughly how many, and your palette references. If it is a game, tell us what the dice ship alongside — matching a component set changes what we recommend.