Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University.  This week, Thorne looks at the economics of dice.

Got to looking at the number of different lines of dice we stock in the store.  Although we sell them day in and out, we don’t really think much about them, except when we look at our sales figures and see they account for anywhere from 2% to 5% of monthly sales, certainly a healthy chunk of change; then I get to thinking about the number of different companies selling them, each with their own place in the market and how the different lines contribute to the overall success of dice sales.  Even a miniatures dominated company such as Games Workshop generates a reasonable percentage of its sales in our store through dice and the niche looks profitable enough that Fantasy Flight Games recently entered the market with six sided dice as part of its accessories line.

Chessex is the dominant brand and our best selling line, mainly, I think, because of the plastic box packaging and the new color sets that are released several times a year.  Surprisingly, at least here, the more expensive speckled and marbled colors outsell the flat colored opaque ones.  I think our customers like to go through the sets and find one they haven't seen before to add to their collections.  The flat colored opaques are common enough that everyone can find a set if they wish, but a Glow Blue/Yellow, now that's a color you won't easily find in other dice bags around the table.

Koplow is a dice line that has existed much longer than the Chessex selection, as Koplow dates back to 1974, with Chessex a relative newcomer, only dating back to 1987. Due to Chessex's much wider availability through distribution in the 1980s and 1990s, more stores adopted the Chessex line over Koplow.  Koplow dice, for our store, have never achieved more than marginal sales with their Train Dice Game the best selling item that we stock from the company.

A second line that does OK for us, not nearly as well as the Chessex colors are the dice from Valiant Games.  Valiant started off as a RPG publisher and started dealing in dice to provide a steady supply for their own games.  Eventually, dice sales eclipsed RPG sales and though you can find references to the original RPG  (Hidden Legacy) on the company website, dice sales dwarf sales of the game.  For years, Valiant has custom designed dice sets for the store and even tagged them with the store logo. Their pricing structure allows us to offer a 9 dice bagged set with our logo on the hangtag for the same MSRP as a similar Chessex set.  However, customers still seem to prefer the Chessex line, likely because of the familiarity of the packaging and the ever-changing selection of colors.

A third line that does alright now but did much better when it first released is Crystal Caste.  The company came out with a line of oblong dice that really piqued customer interest.  A bit pricier than the more standard Chessex and Koplow dice, the Crystal Caste dice sold extremely well when first released, but that fascination waned.  Over the last few years, though it still sells the oblong crystal dice, Crystal Caste has recast itself, so to speak, as a more mainstream dice company, offering dice styles similar to those from Valiant, Chessex and Koplow, as well as a few innovations, such as the d1000 and semi-precious stone dice.

GameScience and IronDice are both comparative newcomers, though the GameScience name has been around since 1974.  Game Station bought the rights to the GameScience name and dice lines in 2009 and has had moderate success relaunching the line, which focuses on the dice created by Col. Lou Zocchi: the 100 sided Zocchihedron, three sided and five sided dice, and uninked razor edged dice, which have a hard time competing against the inked ones popularized by Koplow and Chessex.

IronDice just lauched this year, imported by Green River Games from an Italian tool shop.  Though there is a game associated with the dice, which are all variations on a six sided die, our customers have so far preferred to purchase them for their appearance, showing little interest in the game.

The 80/20 rules comes into play again with dice sales as it does with many other products in the store as 80% of our sales come from only 20% of the dice lines.

The opinions expressed in this column are solely  those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect th views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.