#letter dice

[sprinklecipher]

Letter Dice Update

Adding a photo that gives a better sense of just how big the 26-sided die is

I wasn't kidding about the apple thing!

[sprinklecipher]

Letter Dice (with a Twist)

For cryptography reasons, I’ve wanted to get letter dice where each letter has an equal chance of occurring. This has been much harder to achieve than you might expect, since pretty overwhelmingly the letter frequencies are weighted so that more common letters occur more times on the dice (which is good for word games but not ideal for the kinds of weird, niche edge cases that I have in mind).

The letter distributions that letter dice sets actually have:

(This is specifically the letter distribution for Big Boggle, but other letter dice are generally very similar; source)

The letter distribution that I want:

I’ve searched around a bit, and from what I can tell, there aren’t any readymade letter dice out there that work the way that I want—basically all the letter dice on the market are at least somewhat weighted by letter frequency. The one exception I’ve seen is a set of 30-sided letter dice like the one below, but those come with the caveat of having 4 “wild” sides on them that keep them from being quite what I’m looking for.

Those “wild” faces are an affront to everything that I stand for. Here's the link anyway, I guess

The readymade letter dice industry really let me down, but I did manage to find an Etsy shop that sells blank 26-sided wooden dice, so it is possible to make a letter die that has equal letter representation. It’s literally the only such die that I have found anywhere, so of course I had to buy it and try it out. It’s a bit on the expensive side for a single die, and definitely too big and heavy to practically use as part of a dice set. Its massive size does make it pretty fun to throw around, though!

Before painting. Not sure if you can tell from the photo, but this thing is basically the size of an apple and completely solid. You could probably use it as a murder weapon if you were so inclined

After painting

Ultimately, the 26-sided die is fun but not great for quickly generating multiple random letters. For that, I think custom sets of smaller dice are definitely the way to go. If for some reason someone else also wants to get a set of letter dice that have an equal chance of giving each letter (when used in combination), my advice would be that the most practical, low-cost approach would be to do so using standard 6-sided dice in sets of 13 (so each letter occurs 3 times across the set). I made a couple sets of dice like that, and the whole process was much faster and cheaper than you might expect (you can get blank dice in bulk for like $10).

The Ideal letter dice set (or at least, close enough)

On the off chance that someone else eventually decides to do the same thing as me, here’s the combinations of letters that I used for each die. I structured the combinations to try to maximize the number of letters that each individual letter occurred with (although these are probably not the mathematically optimal combinations for that criteria):

MCRFAE

NPTVDC

FHWNEK

DOIJEB

ZXIRPL

MHYLJQ

KXJOTS

FGZOQP

CRBQYS

ZTUBWL

UXGYNA

VUMAKI

SVGWDH

[danskjavlarna]

Source details and larger version.

Here’s my gallery of unusual imagery from vintage college yearbooks.

[danskjavlarna]

Source details and larger version.

This will soon double: my collection of vintage twins imagery.