Hello Goonhammer readers! Greg and TheChirurgeon, the worst and dumbest writers on this site, respectively, are officially Back on Our Bullshit. This week we’ve shit out 3,000 words into another definitive ranking article that will rank things in such a way as to cause half of you to stop reading this site out of angry frustration and the other half to start emailing this site out of frustrated anger. So let’s strap in and start talking about the most fundamental tool of the Warhammer game: Dice. Specifically why the ones you have are trash, and owning them makes you a trash person.
White Scars Dice
TheChirurgeon: I’ll admit that when a friend initially described these dice to me, my immediate reaction was to think “God dammit, GW. You accidentally made dice with an SS symbol on them, didn’t you?” I am extremely glad that these didn’t end up that bad.
Greg: Yeah, this could have been a lot worse on the 2s, but I still hate them.
TheChirurgeon: They’re still awful, though
Greg: Apologies to our readers, because you’re going to see this complaint a lot, but I don’t like dice with symbols instead of pips, and I like them even less when they appear on multiple sides.
TheChirurgeon: Yeah I think we should establish up front that dice having symbols on more than one face is bad. At the very least, it’s not immediately obvious which symbol is the 1 and which is the 6 on 2-symbol dice, meaning that you either have to have a discussion with your opponent pre-game about which is which or you are an enormous shitbag. If you’re playing against someone using dice with two symbols, you have to keep an eye on that shit all game to make sure that the same symbol is always being used for the 1s and the 6s. It’s just a huge pain in the ass for something that’s supposed to be as fast and easy as possible.
Greg: I won’t buy or use anything with symbols on more than one face, but I have a few with skulls on them, and every single game I point out before we start that the symbols are 6s, and hold one up and show them the 1 opposite the skull first, just to avoid that. I gave up and started using them as wound trackers for characters with 5 or fewer wounds, instead.
TheChirurgeon: Yeah, even when they aren’t the worst, symbol dice just create so much additional headache and mental work.
TheChirurgeon: So in conclusion, these are bad for several reasons.
Greg: They are bad and if you use them, you need to immediately stop.
Space Wolves Dice
TheChirurgeon: Space Wolves finally get the dice their players deserve.
Greg: “The dog heads are 6s. No, the other ones.”
TheChirurgeon: The claw marks are supposed to look all edgy and feral but really they just look like something you’d see on a t-shirt right behind the words NO FEAR
Greg: The official dice of anyone who’s ever had to sort their beer logo t-shirts into “work” and “date night” piles.
TheChirurgeon: Why yes, this is my fancy Pantera T-shirt. Why do you ask?
Greg: The designs on this shit are like a Rorschach test to find out what kind of alcohol-related crime you’re going to get busted for. Is it a DUI? Drinking on top of a school? Sky’s the limit, awuuuui.
TheChirurgeon: Shit, I rolled wolfskull. Looks like I’m spending the night in a cell for pissing on a retirement home again.
Dark Angels Dice
Greg: Nope. No, not doing this.
TheChirurgeon: extremely innocent voice not doing what, buddy?
TheChirurgeon: No but for reals, the Dark Angels icon is absolutely the “1” on these dice.
Greg: I actually agree with you there. It technically has 1 sword on it, and they’re the first legion, yes, but mostly because I think the Dark Angels logo deserves to be the worst possible thing you can roll. Games Workshop should make that the icon for rolling a 1 on all of their dice, even the Age of Sigmar ones. Casinos should too. Anywhere in the world when you beef up a die roll, buddy that’s the Dark Angels.
TheChirurgeon: I like that there are three colors of them. You just know that somewhere out there is a Dark Angels player who bought multiple sets of these so he could roll only Deathwing dice for Deathwing, and only Ravenwing dice for Ravenwing.
Greg: I want to make fun of that but it’s also extremely some shit I would do.
Howling Banshee Dice
TheChirurgeon: Man Elf dice are the fuckin worst.
Greg: What the fuck? Credit where it’s due, at least they have numbers on all the sides, but why are they all hidden inside a weird Eldar sex pyramid?
TheChirurgeon: I can only assume the goal with these dice was to make something as difficult to read as possible, where every face looks identical without the help of a microscope.
Greg: They were so close – bright high-contrast colors, readable numbers – and they just fucked it up at the end by blowing 80% of the space on fuckin’ designs. This is the worst kind of Elf Bullshit.
TheChirurgeon: I’m trying to imagine the person who has every set of these for all of their Aspect Warriors, and only rolls the matching dice for each group. And also where in their basement they hide the bodies of their victims.
Death Guard Dice
TheChirurgeon: You know what? I don’t care how they’re balanced or how hard they are to read, I fucking love these stupid dice.
Greg: I’m not surprised that you love the puke ice cubes.
TheChirurgeon: Every time I roll my dice, I want to be reminded of that time in college when you had too much SoCo and threw up in my sink and I was so drunk that I just reached in and cleaned it out with my hands so the sink could drain. Just real pleasant memories to work off of.
Greg: If I ever upchuck anything that looks like these I will proceed directly to the nearest hole and start throwing dirt on top of myself.
TheChirurgeon: These are neat because they were like the first wacky dice. I remember when these dice first came out and people were like “what the fuck is going on here these are hard to read.” Oh we were such sweet summer children then.
Greg: I want to get these to use as scatter terrain. We’ve already got barrels and ammo crates, Vomit Energon Cubes almost make sense.
TheChirurgeon: The sole source of energy on planet 4Loko.
Ultramarines Dice
TheChirurgeon: Finally, dice for cops.
Greg: Blue Squares, the true form of all Ultramarines.
Greg: I’m just surprised the symbol on the 6 isn’t a Punisher skull.
TheChirurgeon: These are somehow an improvement from the last set of Ultramarines dice, which were just beige cubes with nothing on the faces.
Greg: Legit my favorite thing about these is that the 4 has a giant Roman numeral 5 on it with a smaller upside down 4 in it.
Idoneth Deepkin Dice
TheChirurgeon: This is it. The worst dice in the world.
Greg: I honestly don’t know if these even meet the clinical definition of being dice. The numbers, on the sides that even bother to have numbers, are unreadable, and who the hell decided that clear material would be a good idea on something that’s supposed to be legible from across the table?
TheChirurgeon: You can’t even read them here, in the promo image, the image designed to show them off as a product.
Greg: Start with an ornate eldritch rune. Aww yeah, that’s the Elf aesthetic in full effect. And then you move on to calming beachfront waves? Dooooope, I mean they’re from the ocean after all. And then, to cap it all off, a skull. What the fuck? Nothing has meaning anymore.
TheChirurgeon: These aren’t dice; they’re novelty ice cubes for assholes.
Sylvaneth Dice
TheChirurgeon: OH FUCK I WAS WRONG IT GETS WORSE
Greg: I think I saw these at a chocolate store in the mall once.
TheChirurgeon: GW selling dice made of chocolate would actually be kind of cool, until you went to roll them once and ended up with brown smears all over your hands and the table.
Greg: Dice that will kill your dog when they eat them. Which, uhh, I guess really any dice would do, now that I think about it.
TheChirurgeon: Nah, the dog totally would survive eating these. That’s how Nurgle dice get made.
Greg: The dog barfs these up and they somehow become more legible.
Kill Team Dice
TheChirurgeon: These (and their less-swag boxed game black-with-orange-pips brothers) are the best dice Games Workshop makes by a country mile.
Greg: I appreciate that they included d10s in this set, even though the actual game doesn’t use them at all. The first time GW made something that wasn’t a d6, and it gets used during list construction to randomly choose your Kill Team’s background, a table which has no in-game effect other than making you look like a dork who needed special fucking dice to decide if they were Sad Murderers or Happy Murderers.
TheChirurgeon: Hey don’t forget “Extremely stern murderers with vaguely Latin-sounding names.”
Greg: These are my [rolls] Astra Conprimos from [rolls] the bottom of the ocean, and they [rolls] get sexual pleasure from [rolls] knives.
Squig Dice
TheChirurgeon: I always wanted my dice to have a butthole and Games Workshop finally delivered.
Greg: I imagine these do less “rolling” and more just “slapping down on the table like a piece of raw meat”.
TheChirurgeon: I will be intensely disappointed if rolling these doesn’t make either a bunch of wet splurpy noises or tiny little farts as they hit the table. I say “will be” because I have never seen these in the wild and I suspect they do not really exist.
Greg: I fully expect them to be warm to the touch at all times. Do they scream when you roll them, or is it more of a terrified whimper?
TheChirurgeon: I can’t decide if these are made out of super-bouncy rubber so they never stop bouncing around or if they’re made of squishy foam like MAD BALLS.
Greg: I bet they grow hair if you leave them in the dark long enough.
TheChirurgeon: They definitely eat other, smaller dice to survive.
Games Workshop Battle Dice
TheChirurgeon: Look I don’t want to be “That Guy,” but I used these for years and I will swear to any god you want that these dice roll like absolute ass. In this essay, I will
Greg: Heeeey guys, what’s up, welcome to the BATTLE DICE podcast. Remember to BATTLE LIKE, BATTLE COMMENT, and BATTLE SUBSCRIBE.
TheChirurgon: The only dice that are BATTLE-TESTED for the GRIM BATTLEFIELDS of the FORTY-FIRST BATTLENNIUM
Greg: I half expected the official 1990s Warhammer dice to be black with black pips overlaid by heavy metal album art, but these are shockingly decent, compared to the rogue’s gallery of hateful bullshit they’re putting out these days.
TheChirurgeon: Yeah but again, they roll like complete ass. My friend Brandon finally just bought me some Chessex dice to play with after a game where I could roll nothing but 1s and 2s. Related note: I love those Chessex dice, and I lost one at NOVA and now I have a cube that is short one die and because I have ~the brainworms~ there’s a nonzero chance that I will throw it away and order another one that is complete. This is fine. Totally normal.
A Bunch of Casino Dice
TheChirurgeon: Definitely the dice a total asshole would buy
Greg: A fun fact about these dice is that they shatter if you hurl them at concrete. Is what I heard. From a friend.
TheChirurgeon: I hadn’t heard that. What I had heard was that you can get these cheap, and by the hundred, so when you start rolling like total shit in a major campaign game you can just throw each one that rolls a 1 into the trash.
Greg: Not all of the 1s, I’d run out. I mean, my friend, he’d run out.
Brexit Dice
Greg: Someone dropped these bad boys on Goonhammer HR Director and Known Englishman One_Wing, and you love to see it. This is the rudest shit to ever happen in a game store that didn’t involve someone getting dragged out by their mom.
TheChirurgeon: These are amazing. Where did these even come from?
Greg: So apparently these were custom-made by some of the ETC (European Team Championship) teams specifically to fuck with the British players. Which is incredible as an own, but also sucks because I want to buy them and I can’t.
TheChirurgeon: I love these on a conceptual level. As soon as these come out at the game table against a Brit, you have immediately colonized a space in their heads to live rent-free forever.
Greg: It honestly doesn’t matter how these things roll, you cannot lose a game where you deploy this kind of savagery.
TheChirurgeon: This would be like if I went to play a game in the UK and Artum just had a bunch of dice where instead of 6s, they had statistics about child poverty in the United States.
Necromunda Dice
TheChirurgeon: These are fine, I guess.
Greg: I assume the random bullet holes and arrows have meaning in Necromunda – I don’t play it and I never will – but I also wouldn’t put it past them to have those on there to fuck with me. Everyone knows a broken bone is a 4 and a plus sign is a 3, right?
TheChirurgeon: Yeah the bone ones are used for injuries. It’d be kind of like if Kill Team had a die for rolling flesh wounds, except in Kill Team half the results would just say “haha fuck you.”
Greg: Necromunda owns because it’s the one game where there aren’t any fucking elves.
Final Thoughts
Look, it’s real simple: If you use dice that have symbols on multiple sides, you’re a monster and I hope children throw rocks at you when you walk down the street. Otherwise, use whatever dice make you happy, I guess. Doing this was a lot of fun – it was a nice little stroll down memory lane into all the weird, stupid dice Games Workshop has released. I definitely get the feeling that they think these are a hilarious novelty that no one uses and not something that well-meaning jerks and terrible cheaters trot out to confuse their opponents. The important thing is that we can all sit down and make fun of these dice and the people who play with them. So you could say that the real dice were the friends we made along the way. Or whatever. Anyways, send all of your emails stuffed with effusive praise for us and the good work we’re doing here to contact@goonhammer.com, and we’ll definitely read it, print it out, and put it on our fridge where everyone can see.
