❖ Version History ❖

August, 2023 & August, 2024
In our previous episode of the Librarium Games Design Journal, we got to talking about the insanity that lead to our first season at the renaissance fair in 2023. One slice of that story that was glazed over was the narrative behind our construction of the Magic Dice Roller, another magnificent accessory idea we had for Phoenix Farm.

Now, if you have been following along the journey of the Design Journal, you may have read the first post we put up about the magic dice here: Phoenix Farm Part #21 :: “Legend of the Magic Dice”

In that story, we discussed the original idea behind the dice roller & why we wanted to chase that dream (along with a snapshot of the future of the dice, which we will now discuss today!).

Way back then, we were struggling to sort out how to even make the dice in the first place. By the time we were planning on going to the renfaire, we had more or less mastered the process of making the dice, but now we needed as many of them as we could possibly get our hands on in order to stock our store. This meant that we needed to make about x100 of the dice to be ready with only about 3-4 weeks to prepare. And behind the scenes in our workshop, that looked something like this:

Now, as an interesting bridge between 2023 – 2024, I will say that the dice you see pictured above turned out to be an absolute disaster. This batch of dice ended up being painted with a slightly different acrylic paint than what I had been play testing for the year or two leading up to this moment. I happened to be traveling the week that I painted all of these dice with the lovely & ever so patient Aya (who helped an astronomical amount during this process with running the 3d printer endlessly & excruciatingly painting all these pips).

After painting all of these dice, they were placed in jars & stored away to be brought to the renfaire for the final powder coloring & wax sealing process. Alas, when we arrived at the renfair, these dice looked like literal spaghetti monsters, for, the different pain we used actually expanded in the water and looked like demonic tenticles that no longer in any way resembled dice. By a stroke of incredible luck, we actually managed to utilize these ‘cursed’ dice as a marketing campaign during the renfaire & helped us recover from this disaster.

During the 2023 Renfaire, and over the winter into 2024 we ended up making x300 more dice that also needed all of this treatment of painting, water, powder dye, tying up, sealing with wax, and labeling. This was in one part to help us recover from the mess of the cursed dice, and also in one part to help set up the major marketing event of the Phoenix Farm Kickstarter process, which very quickly was approaching post the renfaire season of 2023. This next batch of x300 came out much nicer:

In order to get everything ready for this batch, and enormous amount of thread work & melted wax was needed. We also needed to produce special stickers to fit on the tiny jars in order to make them look a bit nicer for display in the store. Here is a great photo of the dice jars going through that process:

In the end, over the course of 2023-2024, we needed to make approximately x500 dice in total, because we practically sold out of the initial batch we made for the renfaire in 2023, we completely destroyed a batch by accident, and (fast forwarding here a little bit) we needed about x170 of the dice for the Kickstater + another batch for the 2024 renfaire. After making all of these little plastic pieces, this means that we literally painted 10,500 pips white (not to mention at least another 10,000 pips black!).

But.
When the final batches of the nicest dice were being finished, they looked absolutely incredible:

And though at this point in the story we are still a ways away from the actual Kickstarter Launch for Phoenix Farm, it is specifically because of the events in August 2023 that connected the dots from our crazy dice idea back in 2022 to this final product shown about near the end of 2024!

I know that this was probably one of the greatest time leaping tales in the history of the Design Journal, but it was a huge timeline from the original idea to the fruition of that idea on this accessory.

Next time on the design journal, we will get ourselves back in the mindset of the Phoenix Farm Game Design process before going on another tangent of accessory design! be sure to check back soon as we will be diving into the nightmare realm of rule book design once again! (hooray?)