Polyhedral dice, showmanship, and loss

I forget now how I originally discovered him, but some time in the late 2010s Louis Zocchi, Air Force Technical Sergeant, magician, and—most relevant to me—manufacturer of polyhedral dice appeared on my radar. I was just about to play in my first D&D game as a player and I was shopping for dice. I stumbled upon this YouTube video of Zocchi at a convention selling his dice. If you can, give it a few minutes to get a sense of the man’s passion and nerdity.

I noticed that his t-shirt had Biloxi, MS on it, and I was immediately intrigued, as I’m a fellow Mississippian. I would later find out my uncle, who lives near the coast, had been shopping at this man’s shop for years.

Gamescience dice have sharp edges. As Zocchi explains in the video, this is because they aren’t put through the rock polishing process that other dice manufacturers use. His description of other manufacturers’ process goes something like this:

Each of those polishing steps tears away at the plastic, leaving the edges unevenly worn down and the dice unbalanced. You can put the dice through a couple tests to prove this.

One, you can stack ten dice that have the same number of sides end-to-end in one orientation, measure the length, then stack them in a perpendicular orientation and measure again. If the measurements come out differently, the dice are unbalanced and will favor some faces over others.

Two, you can put some water in a glass and add salt. Drop a plastic die into the water. If you tap the top of it and send it tumbling, it should resurface on a random face. An unbalanced die, however, will tend to favor one end or its opposite more often than the other faces.

So, the downside of the polishing process is dice balance. The downside of not doing that process is that the numbers need to be inked another way. For Gamescience, that meant paying a little extra to have them do it for you or doing it yourself with the proper pen. Zocchi didn’t seem to think that was a big downside and made a video showing you how to do it.

The other downside is a small blemish where the die is cut from the sprue. This is an artifact of injection molding that can’t really be avoided. The polishing process I described above removes that blemish, albeit at the cost of dice balance.

That’s the gist of his argument for not polishing his dice and requiring them to be inked after the fact manually. I don’t know enough about dice production to know if all of this is true. I’m just presenting the argument as he puts it.

I don’t know a lot about the history of the company itself. My uncle told me he used to go to Zocchi’s game shop in Biloxi, MS. By the time I ordered my first few sets of dice, the company had already changed hands. In fact, in that video above where Zocchi is inking the dice, he mentions that fact. He continued going to conferences and representing the company.

There is something incredibly fascinating to me about someone that would be so passionate about something so seemingly trivial as the balance of polyhedral dice. In the video of him at the conference, Zocchi mentions multiple times that game masters are potentially killing off characters who should have lived. He describes it in a way that makes it life and death, and that is hilarious to me. He was adamant that a die should give you “equal access to all of its faces.”

I wish I had a chance to visit his store and meet him in person. He just seems like an interesting guy to talk to. I do think some of his dice look really cool, and I prefer the aesthetic of the sharp edge look myself. In my experience, the ink wasn’t staying on the numbers very well. I had some black dice with gold inking and some red dice with white inking. I paid a little extra at checkout to have them do that for me. I was surprised to see that after a few gaming sessions, the ink was starting to wear off. I don’t know if it was the type of ink or what. I’m sure that would be a dealbreaker to a lot of folks. But I’m still partial to them.

I’m still trying to find my Gamescience dice from back then. I put them in a nice container and I seem to have misplaced them.

Something got me to thinking about Louis Zocchi and Gamescience dice yesterday. I looked him up only to find out that he died in April of this year. I didn’t know the man, but it really bummed me out. I wonder if my uncle knows.

I’m not sure what the status of the company is. There is a website up, and there is, in fact, a catalog of dice for sale. The sets seem quite limited and, if I understand correctly from various Facebook and Reddit postings I found, the dice that are currently for sale are part of a huge cache of dice that he had on hand. There were posts from the company that they were going to start manufacturing dice again, but I have no idea what the status of that is or if it will really happen.

The thing is, I can’t even roll physical dice anymore. I couldn’t when I got my first sets in the late 2010s. When I played my sessions, I had someone rolling them for me.

I think part of my nostalgia is not only about the dice, but about my lost ability to roll dice. I can’t tell if I really feel nostalgia for the brand, the idea of the man behind them, or if it’s subconsciously a placeholder for nostalgia and grief about my own abilities that I’ve since lost. Rolling dice, writing by hand, paging through a book, sifting through cards—all of these are physical aspects of tabletop gaming that I miss. For all of my investment in digital tools and resources—going as far as to build my own character sheet app—I still find myself longing for physical artifacts of the game.

I found myself poking through the catalog on their website, wanting some of the gem style dice. I paused writing this article long enough to fill up a cart with various styles and check out. I have no clue if I’ll even receive anything (but I will edit this article if I do).

He seemed to have lived a full life. He is remembered by many who appreciate his passion and what he gave to the gaming world. He’s remembered by a disabled man on the internet he’s never met, writing about him months after he passed from this world. He’s even remembered by the characters who might have had their lives cut short if not for his beautiful precision dice.