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Gamescience providing precision dice for more than 40 years

Louis Zocchi at GenCon 2014. / Photo courtesy of Gamescience

For those old enough to remember the earliest days of Dungeons & Dragons and other tabletop role playing games, the dice available often were of lackluster quality. Sometimes soft but brittle around the edges, the dice had a tendency to flake or dent easily, not only making them appear less than appealing, but also damaging their statistical usefulness. Even today there are players who are interested not only in the attractiveness of the dice they purchase, but the accuracy of those dice.

This is where Gamescience comes into play. A publisher of board games, war games and role playing games since 1965, in 1974 Gamescience began producing what today are commonly called precision dice. The man behind Gamescience’s dice is Louis Zocchi.

To provide a full résumé of Zocchi’s gaming-related accomplishments over the years would fill an encyclopedia, from editing early Avalon Hill magazines to designing games to being the first U.S. maker of polyhedral dice, Zocchi has seen it all and done it all, including creating the Zocchihedron, the 100-sided die, in 1985.

Recently Mr. Zocchi was available for a brief interview. Questions and answers are below.

1.) How did Gamescience come about?

After I had designed my Battle of Britain game, Phil Orbanes of Gamescience offered to print it for me if I would give him $2,000, which he would pay back later. I sent him a prototype and my check, and he had the game published and took it to the Chicago Hobby show where a Mr. Casey saw it. Mr. Casey was the head of Allstate investors which owned the Renwal Models plastics company. His plan was for Renwal to make plastic models which would go into the game. He bought the game rights for $10,000. While Phil Orbanes was delivering it to Renwal, he got a job there to design games after he graduated in a month or two. Renwal published a few of his designs and then made a huge mistake by manufacturing the Living Pigeon. Another company had made a human body with removable inner parts and was selling quite a few, so someone at Renwal thought that a living pigeon would sell, and I was told that they invested over one million dollars to make the pigeon with removable inner body parts, which no body bought. I was told that I could buy their unsold supply of 18,000 Battle of Britain games, and with it I got the Gamescience name.

2.) Why do you believe Gamescience dice are better than others?

If you go to any casino, you will see that they are using precision-made dice which are machined to be less than 1,000th of an inch different in thickness, to meet federal law requirements. Cheaters will trim 1,000th of an inch off of the edges they want to continue rolling and leave the edges where they want it to stop in pristine condition, which makes them more likely to stop. I ink every Gamescience die by hand to assure that each of its edges are exactly where they should be and that every face performs a uniform amount of stopping power, which assures that the die will generate random numbers. Each of my competitors takes a manufacturing short cut to get ink into the digits of their dice. All polyhedral dice are made by plastic injection machines. To get the plastic into each mold, each die is connected to the main casting sprue by a runner. When the die is clipped free of the runner, it has a small blemish.

I’m sure you have made plastic tanks or airplanes where the parts you needed had to be clipped free of the casting runner. Each Gamescience die has a small blemish where it has been clipped free of the casting runner, but my competitors need to get rid of that blemish because paint will lodge in it and make the die face ugly. So they toss these dice into a rock polisher and tumble them until every die in the batch has lost its clip mark. Then these dice are put into a french-fry basket and dipped into a can of paint. After every die has been thoroughly covered by paint, they take them out to dry. Once the dice are dry, they put them back into the rock polisher with a very coarse polishing material which takes off all of the unwanted paint from the die faces. They are tumbled until the underline which was cast below every digit has also been polished off. The course material leaves scratch marks and blemishes on every die, so they are put into another rock polisher and given another tumbling with a very fine grit which polishes off the blemishes. During all of these polishing steps, the dice loose their shapes and some are as much as 15,000ths of an inch shorter than others. When I took my caliper to a convention and tried to show buyers the 15,000ths of an inch differential, none of them would take the caliper and measure the distances for themselves. That is when I decided to stack ten of the tallest faces on top of each other next to ten of the shortest faces stacked on top of each other. When finished I could see 3/4ths of an inch difference between the tall stack and the short stack.

When I went to the next convention, I took all of these egg-shaped dice and stacked them so that buyers could see the difference. The third guy to come to my table bumped it and all of the dice fell out of their stacks to the floor. I gathered them up and spent two hours re-stacking them, after which the next customer bumped the table and they all fell to the floor again. I decided that it would be better to take a photo of these dice stacks which would show how much difference there was.

(Note: For a visual example of Mr. Zocchi’s thoughts on dice, see the video below.)

3.) What’s different today about the gaming world than when you started?

For a long time I had only two dice competitors, Chessex and Armory. When Chessex told me they wanted to sell my dice, I asked them to be sure to put a notice in each tube that these were Gamescience dice. I discovered later that it took them two years of selling my dice before they put slips in the packaging which identified them as Gamescience. Although the Armory sold my d100, they never sold my other dice shapes.

Kevin Cook has the worlds largest dice collection. He is in the Guinness book of records because of his 50,000 dice collection. When I asked him how many people are in the dice business today, he sent me a list which was more than 95 names long.

Louis Zocchi’s 1980 comparison photograph.

Several people who are new to gaming complain that the 1980 photo I use to show how egg-shaped are the dice of my competitors should be updated. Why should this photo be updated when all of the new people making dice are still using the rock polisher method to get a contrasting color into the numbers of every face? The Awesome Dice blog conducted a 10,000-roll test of a Gamescience d20 against a Chessex d20. If the law of averages did what should be expected, each die should roll each of its faces 500 times. Neither die did this. They went on to say that faces which came up within 33 over or under the 500 would be counted as rolling the 500. The Chessex 5 face came up 488 times. It was the only face to meet the testing criteria. The Gamescience die had four faces which came up within 10 points of the 500 mark, and 13 faces overall came within the 500 mark. The Gamescience d20 they tested had a protruding clip mark on its face 7 which caused its opposite face (14) to come up only 295 times. Before this test, I told everyone that the blemish didn’t influence the performance of the die. I now know that each die must have any blemish cut down.

Another test was conducted. Because the person conducting this test did not know that I had measured every die face to find the tallest and the shortest faces before I made my stacks, he assumed that every dice company had tall 1-20 faces and short 9-12 faces. He made stacks of Crystal cast, Chessex, Koplow and Gamescience dice. He also measured each die and published his findings. Chessex dice thickness differed from .014 to .027. Crystal Cast Gems were 028 to 044. Koplow dice were .006 to .020. Gamescience minimums were .002 and maximum was .009.

Several new players claim that I never prove what I’m talking about. (Above) are the results of two tests over which I had no control. Each test confirmed that Gamescience dice are more uniformly manufactured and that they consistently generate random outcomes. Their tests confirm that egg-shaped dice tend to stop on their shortest sides more often than stopping on their tallest sides. When I tell gamers about the 10,000 test rolls, several of them fault the test as being too short to be significant. They say at least 100,000 rolls should have been made. I agree with them and suggest that they conduct the 100,000 test rolls so that they will know its true results. None of them seem interested in doing that much research.

4.) How have gamers and hobbyists changed over the years?

When I started playing Avalon Hill war games in 1959, it was the only company who knew how to do it. A few years later I heard about Dungeons & Dragons and felt that half of the hobby had changed. About 15 years later, Magic the Gathering appeared and along with it a lot of people making good money by selling cards. Almost no one remembers that that was the year of the baseball strike. There were hundreds of ma ma and pa pa sports card dealers who began selling Magic the Gathering because they were people who had always sold single cards and no one was buying baseball cards. I’m sorry to say that board gaming fans are hard to find.

5.) You’ve a long list of accomplishments within the war gaming and general gaming communities. What are some of your personal favorite accomplishments?

The Zocchihedron, the d100 created by Louis Zocchi.

Quite probably the invention of the 100-sided die is the only accomplishment for which I’ll be remembered. It took me six years to figure out where each number should be located. My Battle of Britain game was the first serious board game to simulate air to air combat. My Luftwaffe air combat board game stayed on the Avalon Hill all-time best sellers list for 25 years. My Star Fleet Battle Manual game won the Best Game of the Year During the Games Day convention in England (in 1981). In 1981 I won the H.G. Wells award for my Basic and Advanced fighter combat game. In August of 1979 I pioneered the manufacture of of gem-colored polyhedral dice. Before that, only opaque dice colors like red, white, blue, green, etc., were being made. In Origins 2008, I was made a Guest of Honor, and they put my name on the aisle where my booth was situated. Other aisles were named for Gary Gygax, Don Greenwood, and Redmond Simonson. I was very surprised by this and vastly honored to be thought of on the same level as those great gaming pioneers.

6.) What would you still like to accomplish in the gaming world?

I still know a vast number of new dice shapes, and I hope to live long enough to put them into production.

Mr. Zocchi, thank you for your answers and your time. Hopefully more and more newer gamers will get to know Gamescience dice.

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