g026r wrote:
I've checked them before.  You can almost make a set out of their singles, but not quite.

And this reminds me that I never emailed Deadlord.  I shall have to do that.

I thought I has "missed out" and i e-mailed them and he sold me a set for around $10... I figured that was fair since I've wanted these dice for like 20 years! and they were brand new.

I might get some of those singles just to have them. I dig the pick 6-siders

Kaskoid wrote:
Not in the first six years; I was only there from '75 to '80.
We bought the dice while I was there from Hong Kong in HUGE quantities; some bagged as sets, some loose. I recall a box that came in all smooshed up that had to have had about 10,000 d20s in it in mixed colors. They were the old "low impact", soon-to-be rounded- edges style. The carton was about 40 inches square, perhaps larger.

BTW, did Uncle Lou ever actually make(mold) the dice himself, or order them and then fill in the numbers? I suspect the latter.
At GenCon 40, as I came up to his booth, Lou was hand-coloring numerals...

Hmmm, then what's the story with the B&J dice I just bought from Advancing hordes? they are identical to the Holmes edition dice my friend has from way back.

I wish Lou wouldn't ink his dice... I prefer the old fashioned way, with crayon. I look so much better

http://www.advancinghordes.com/about_bjtibbetts.php

...this would make sense with the time frame you mention.

Do you have any pictures or examples of earlier dice sold through TSR before the Holmes edition?

Thanks,
D

TheMilford wrote:Then came these (Moldvay/cook sets):
[ Image ]
mine were pale blue in my Basic set and brown in my Expert

That seems like an odd crayon/dice colour-combination to have chosen.  I can't see it being that readable.

Sorry, no pics of earlier sets; but I do still have one baby blue "softy" left in my dice box.

IIRC, the earliest sets did not have D6; it was assumed anyone could rob any other game for them and all that were provided were the ones that only math teachers had access to.

Tim, you said at Gen Con that I never post in your thread.  Well, you finally brought up a subject I can pretend to be an expert about, so here goes:

Kaskoid wrote:BTW, did Uncle Lou ever actually make(mold) the dice himself, or order them and then fill in the numbers? I suspect the latter.

Since Gamescience is/was a distributor as well as a manufacturer, there are some dice in his catalog which Lou doesn't make, but his bread-and-butter Gamescience brand is all his creation, and hand-inked because  he says the mass-inking techniques (essentially, painting the whole die and using a rock tumbler-type machine to chip off the excess) creates dice with unevenly rounded edges, which biases the dice.

On the other hand, there was a mail-order company, Diamond Dice, that was buying Gamescience dice, inking them, and selling them in new packages. When Lou found out, he cut off their dice supply, so Diamond Dice (which was really just a married couple in Illinois working out of their hobby shop) commissioned their own dice-making machine, and carried on for years selling dice that look so much like Lou's that most people can't tell them apart. The Diamond Dice couple just retired a couple of years ago, in fact.

And to bring this sort of back on topic, Diamond Dice's "hook" was that they only sold "direct to the consumer" -- through their monthly advertisement in Dragon.

That's my expert moment for the year. I can go back to being a lurker now.