Poor mans battle dice

Just curious, what is the point of “hit dice”?

Just makes it easier to determine hits?  I get that, if so.  Deprives you of a statistical perspective though on what you rolled.

Also, what is the technical scoop on A&A dice?  For years I and my gaming companions have contemplated the relative reliability of the OOB dice in regards to shape and weight, knowing the reality that given the drilled holes for the dots they were likely biased towards 6’s as the lightest side.

Also what was the scoop on FMG dice?  I suspect because the “1” is painted that they are even more biased toward 6’s?

Further, why did they “round” the edges of the later A&A OOB dice?  Is that some technical thing to allow it to roll around more?  Are sharp edges undesirable?

Finally, I’ve been told certified vegas dice are really the only truly reliable dice. Fact or fiction?

Thanks

K

@robert:

I’d like to to see anyone paint pips in a few seconds BTW.  :-D

Actually, I wasn’t thinking about painting pips.  I was thinking about solid face colours: for example, red die face = hit, blue die face = miss.  No pips at all.

@Karl7:

Just curious, what is the point of “hit dice”?

I had thought that it would be a little quicker rolling all of the dice at once. It turns out that it is a lot faster because of the time saved determining what to roll. In the first round you gather all of the dice you need, then you roll them and take your casualties. When counting your casualties you simply remove that number of dice from your pile of dice that you gathered before the combat began. It’s easier to count them too. If say you’re using white dice for infantry then you’ll want to remove the white dice before you start removing the red dice. Remove the red before the blue, remove the blue before the green.

In a large battle you are not stuck counting up how much of everything that you have left in the battle because the number of dice left in your hand has already done that for you. That’s where the real time saving is found.

@robert:

I’d like to to see anyone paint pips in a few seconds BTW.  :-D

You likely could do so if you made a guide to help line up the pips. But then you have to consider the amount of work to set up the guide or guides (say, one guide for painting out 6’s, one for painting out 5’s, etc…)

-Midnight_Reaper

I don’t like homemade dice.

Before I got into Axis & Allies, I was an avid player of Heroclix, which is a kind of superhero chess game that uses dice to help resolve combat.

It was very common for conventions, both local and regional or national, to provide customized dice as part of sign-ups, and per tournament rules, players could bring their own dice. When one player bought certified used casino dice and kept getting crushed, we began to feel something was up. After a few months of suspicion, we cleared the calendar and spent an evening testing the dice everyone was using. The results were sobering: even though not designed for cheating, custom dice were sometimes badly biased, both up and down.

My resort was to buy packs of dice from Hoyle, which I could at least put my faith in. I wasn’t seeking perfection–just something better than predictable, detectable bias.

Axis & Allies and HeroClix both try to get around the dice issue by allowing players to roll one another’s dice, but the problem is that, depending on which side you play, you either need better rolls on the attack more often (Axis) or better roles on the defensive more often (Allies at game start), so even using the same dice doesn’t really help if they’re meaningfully off.

Dice roll and tumble and land where they may, to think too much about is crazy… roll this one, roll that one… “if I only rolled it with this side up, would be different outcome”… it’s too much… granted if every roll was a six, be weird, but that don’t happen, least in my games… I say just “roll” with it… you win some, you lose some.