Pourquoi ne fais-je que des 1 ?

I am an engineer and I teach at ASU. In the beginning of every semester there is a lot of book work that my students need to do such as circuit board design and circuit mapping. During this time I have 4 students and a giant mechanical engineering lab at my disposal. So I decided to use my students to improve my 40k game.

In the spring semester of last year I decided to discard the dice myth "I always roll more ones". So I took a box of the red and white GW dice, a cube of 36 chessex dice, 36 square corner dice with pips, and 36 Vegas style square dice with no pips.

I then constructed a series of plastic barriers that would be used to keep each dice independent of the others. In the lab we have a table that is 4 inches thick solid slate built on hydraulic legs to keep balance and resist independent movement. On this table we put all of the dice in the rolling container and labeled each case, giving each individual dice its own chamber and number.

My 4 students then shook and rolled the dice 1000 times, recording each individual result. Afterwards we calculated the results and the Chessex and GW dice averaged 29% ones. Mind you that this is an average and our high was 33 and our low was 23. We removed any statistical anomalies and came up with 29%.

Game room logic, poor source of anything, would dictate that the side with the one is heavier and would therefore be on the bottom more. Unfortunately this is just not true, take popcorn or batholiths as an example. The 6 is too light to stop the momentum of the dice, the rounded corners cannot prevent the dice from turning due to the weight. In the end 1s are by far the most common result. On a 6 sided dice any given number should appear 16.6% of the time, the Vegas dice were dead on and the square dice with pips were pretty close only displaying a 19% ratio for ones.

I contacted Caeser's Palace in Los Vegas and accessed their research, after much duress because they wanted to make sure I was not some gambling shark, and they had results that corroborated mine.

I then proceeded to buy more GW dice and we filled in the corners of the very same dice that we used, carefully melting the new plastic on to the old dice and filing in the corners to the right size and leveling them to .001 for accuracy. The dice then rolled more accurately but there was still a 19% in the ones category. Over a 1000 rolls from 36 dice this 3% variance from the expected norm is just not acceptable and cannot be considered random.

Finally we dissected all of our dice and looked for air pockets or costitutional inconsistencies. We found a few and compared those to the results of the rolls of that individual dice and there was no consistent affect generated by the dice with plastic seeds but there was one with dice that had air bubbles.

So I advise all players to use dice with no pips and only buy clear ones, like in Vegas, so you can see if there was a problem with the making of the dice. This is not going to prevent you from having a bad dice day but it will better ensure that you have some level of consistency.