DUNGEONS & DRAGONS BALDUR’S GATE: DICE AND MISCELLANY / PUBLISHER: DUNGEONS & DRAGONS / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

Dungeons & Dragons players tend to be a bit funny about their dice. Much of the fun of a roleplaying game comes from randomness. Gamers have a tendency to want to make everything go perfectly for their characters, but this makes for boring gameplay. So rules and dice make things unpredictable. In D&D, it’s a bad dice role that can see a hero go through life changing tragedy. A single role of one can spell doom and drama, and it’s part of what makes the game special.

So dice become a bit of focus of attention. Sometimes you want that 20-sided die to come up 20 just so you can defeat the dark lord once and for all. To tie in with the excellent Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus, Wizards of the Coast have released a dice set and though expensive for what it is, it’s a rather interesting accessory.

For a start, we get 11 dice. These odd shaped polyhedrons are marble effect plastic in red and purple with a glitter effect. The numbers are large, bold, easy to read and in gold ink. We get four six-siders, two twenty-siders, two-ten siders (each inked differently to work as percentiles), one twelve-sider, one eight-sider and one four-sider. The last one can be easily lost in a deep pile carpet for someone to tread on. It’s not a requirement, it’s just a think that happens to every table-top gamer at some point in their life.

We also get a thick lined dice tray which works as a two-piece dice box. It’s a little disappointing that this hasn’t been decorated to look like a box-shaped plot device from the Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus campaign, but that would be too large to work as a dice tray. Instead we got the Baldur’s Gate Skull logo on one side and the D&D logo on the other. It’s glittery and gold, and has the infernal script from the game written on the side. It’s a little spooky.

We also get a bunch of player handouts, which are great if you’re planning on running Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus, or a planar based D&D game. We have a chart that compares monster sizes, just in case you wondered how a Bone Devil compares to an Imp, or just how scary Yeenoghu’s Balor is. The chart flips over to reveal a map of Avernus, which is handy if you ever find yourself in the first level of the Nine Hells.  We get a couple of cards with encounter/item tables on them, and a copy of the key to that Infernal Script D&D is suddenly very fond of.

Finally we have a bunch of ‘in-game’ style monster spotter cards, so you can identify an Abyssal Chicken or a Pit Fiend on the go. These store neatly in the box, which does beg the question what to do with them when you’re using the box to roll dice in.

Overall this is a fun, if pricey stocking filler. It adds little value to the game, but it will delight completists and it is quite nice.