One second I used to be at Gen Con, stalking the aisles of the seller flooring for the subsequent massive board sport. The subsequent second I used to be searching for an engagement ring — or a minimum of that’s what it felt like. A girl with lovely palms was lifting semi-precious stones out of a brightly-lit glass case, laying these lovely objects out on a velvet fabric and inspiring me… to roll them.

Luxury has come to tabletop gaming. First it was fancy-ass tables, and this yr it was all about cube. At least two distributors — Dispel Dice and Level Up Dice — have been hawking units of polyhedrals that have been practically as costly as some whole video games, and other people have been standing in line for the chance to purchase them. The largest identify on the ground was Karen Wang, whose $2.3 million crowdfunding marketing campaign for sharp-edged cube filled with inventive inclusions turned heads in 2020. Level Up Dice was additionally current, its huge choice of semi-precious cube not like the rest within the corridor. Every vendor was on the high of their sport, energized by the curiosity and the momentum of the crowds at tabletop gaming’s Super Bowl.

Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon

Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon

Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon

Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon

But it took various work to get to there. Wang, for her half, struggled by way of the pandemic with manufacturing, workflow, and import points. Level Up CEO Alex Abrate stated that many would-be cube makers have merely gone out of enterprise throughout the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

“The problem is that it’s a niche market,” he stated, his voice muffled by the necessary face masks that visitors have been requested to put on this yr. “The problem is that it’s a niche market with very feverish […] customers. So suddenly, we had all this new generation coming in, looking to monopolize [and] capitalize on the dice industry. And then COVID hit, which meant that there wasn’t the avenue to get out of there. So there are places with [literally] tons of dice that they’ve been sitting on for two years. […] They’re dropping their prices everywhere.”

Abrate and Wang each stand out from the group due to how they make their cube and what they make them from. Wang depends on liquid resin — form of just like the two-part glue you should buy on the ironmongery shop — and novel inclusions to present her creations depth and sparkle. There’s additionally the branding that comes together with their names: Crimson Nebula, Eldritch Fire, Magenta Inferno, Faewater — every one a possibility to attach with the fan of a sure form of role-playing sport or marketing campaign.

Abrate’s area of interest is semi-precious stones and extremely uncommon supplies. “What you see here isn’t the only kind of things we work on,” Abrate stated. “We work on things in four figures, five figures. We just finished doing a set of dice out of a Tiger I from World War II.”

Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon

Indrani Ganguly was consultant of one other cohort of dicemakers at Gen Con this yr — unbiased crafters who promote their wares on-line. The first trendy dicemaker in India, her troubles throughout the pandemic got here from discovering the instruments and supplies to even get began. Her largest problem: the air bubbles that have been ruining her units.

Photo courtesy of Indrani Ganguly

Photo courtesy of Indrani Ganguly

Photo courtesy of Indrani Ganguly

Photo courtesy of Indrani Ganguly

“A pressure pot is basically an air compressor tank which compresses any air bubbles in the resin once you put it in there,” Ganguly defined. “So it cures while it’s inside the pressure pot, which means that there’s no bubbles or no little voids in the dice. And that sort of stuff isn’t just available at a Lowe’s or Harbor Freight or stuff like that back home [in Mumbai]. I have to go hunt down these industrial-grade ones and be like, ‘Listen, I don’t want 20 of them. I just want one. Can we please figure something out?’ And it was a lot of that for me.”

Now Ganguly, who was available to just accept the Diana Jones Award on behalf of sport designer Ajit George (Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel), is utilizing gross sales of her cube to fund her journey to Gen Con.

She says she loves the work — even when a single set of cube can take hours to excellent.

“It takes a lot of work and effort to be able to get it to the point where people see it online,” Ganguly stated, “where it’s super glossy and beautiful without any scratches or marks. And that’s hours of work — usually five to six hours of work per step in my seven-step polishing process alone.”

Ganguly says she additionally makes bespoke cube on fee. One shopper needed raven feathers — a nod to Critical Role’s Vax’ildan. But what about cube with Mountain Dew inside?

“I aim to make aesthetically pleasing dice,” Ganguly stated. “I’m not necessarily wanting to make the most cursed dice imaginable.”