I couldn’t tell you the exact year that I first saw a Chessex advertisement, but I began reading Dragon Magazine in 1990 and it wasn’t long after that time that I first saw the Chessex logo in that magazine’s pages. I recently sought out new dice for use with my 4th Edition Rogue, and Chessex was the brand I chose. While there are plenty of fine vendors who carry the Chessex line I chose to shop directly from their website because it included their full product line and they fulfilled orders on individual dice.

My ordering experience started off on a bad foot: the Chessex website lacks e-commerce functionality, and I had to copy the order form from their website, fill in the required information (including product numbers) and paste it into an email to their sales department. This part of the process was exactly as convenient as you would expect it to be…but their post-order customer service made me forgive the company for its lack of online shopping expertise. I received an order confirmation via email within eight hours, made my payment via Paypal, and received my dice only two days after I had placed my payment. The speed with which they fulfilled my order floored me, especially considering the specificity of my purchase: I had ordered one 7-piece set, an extra d20, and two each extra of d4, d6 and d8s.

As far as the product itself is concerned, I received the same sort of high-quality dice which I have come to expect from Chessex. I chose the opaque black dice with white numbering because they were inexpensive; because the white-on-black numbering is easy to read across a gaming table; and because these dice were for my Rogues, and Rogues deserve black dice. The dice were well manufactured and showed no defects. For the truly curious, here’s a picture of my new bones, taken before they saw their first action:

I now own enough high-quality black dice to meet the needs of my Paragon-tier Rogue for the foreseeable future. Despite a cumbersome ordering process Chessex provided A+ customer service, and their product lived up to the quality standards that I’ve always associated with their brand. Thus ends the portion of the review for which Chessex is even remotely responsible…

…and thus begins my insane rant of gamer superstition. My new dice roll for shit! They played their role (no pun intended) in a TPK during a Living Forgotten Realms mega-adventure (two sessions rolled into one) last week. I’ve been down the new dice road many times during my gaming career: my last set of Chessex dice (a 7-piece set rendered in, I believe, Arctic Stone) rolled poorly out of the gate, but after six months of isolation in my closet they emerged as the MVPs of my dice bag. Seriously, those dice roll higher than the Wu-Tang Clan in Amsterdam.

My new set is currently in solitary confinement (i.e., an extra Crown Royal bag in my desk drawer) until Thursday night’s session. If they don’t shape up then I might have to put the in General Population with the other dice, in the hopes that they’ll learn how to roll. Let’s hope it doesn’t go that far, because gen pop isn’t pretty: those lifers from the Basic set will chew a 20-sider up and spit him out if he even looks at them wrong.