Ask HN: Market Demand for Balanced Dice | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Market Demand for Balanced Dice

1 pointgeoduck149 comments

Hi HN! I had a joke idea, that morphed into something that might be practical - but I need some help validating the idea. Who here would be interested in the following:

Some people take games seriously and they want to make sure their dice are fair and balanced. I think they would want certified fair dice. Certifican could be accompanied by a video showing 1000 (or 10k or whatever) roles and statistical summary that all numbers are equally likely.

The rolls could be done via Robot, and unfair dice could be sold via as "normal" dice under a different brand to recoup cost or recycled.

View on HN

> and unfair dice could be sold via as "normal" dice under a different brand to recoup cost

I think the main problem isn’t producing fair dice, but preventing people from switching them for unfair ones.

Because of that, I don’t think selling dice that look just like your fair dice, but aren’t fair is a good idea.

Vegas buys millions of sets of balanced dice every year, so do all the casinos in TROW = a cut throat competitive business.

What you need are WiFi dice that pass all tests, and when used can be 'adjusted' Maybe that is why dice are transparent as well?

They are transparent for more or less the same reason money bills have watermarks.

Money has watermarks to make it harder for counterfeiters to produce counterfeit money that looks like real money.

Transparency makes it harder for counterfeiters to produce counterfeit dice that look like real dice, but aren’t fair.

and harder to hide any WiFi mechanism

I could see it being a thing. There are lots of different shapes of die and they can easily be tampered with. Could even make them required in casinos and such to prove the casino isn't cheating.

The way "serious" gamers find balanced dice is to float them in salt water. Even more serious gamers same the unbalanced ones for "reasons"

Is that scalable? Also, I'm guessing the "more serious gamers" keep the ones that float to 20, but not 1. If so, there is still wasted money because they toss some of the sets.

Do you think people would pay 50% more for a balanced set that they knew wouldn't need to be checked and tossed (similar question for "guaranteed 20s")

Wouldn't it be a serious challenge to tie the proof to the die itself and prove that it had not been altered later?

I was primarily focused on the initial buyer. As in, I'm going to buy dice for myself, and I want a set that are balanced.

Also, regarding home tests. The cost of an individual buying multiple sets of dice and discarding the unbalanced sets until you have a single balanced set is... you have to buy multiple sets of dice

Edit: I'll concede that focusing on the initial buyer may be too limiting, but that is where I started with this idea

Reply on news.ycombinator.com