❖ Version History ❖

November, 2024 – January, 2025
Alrighty folks… remember wayy wayy back when in Part #4 of the Royal Threadcount Design Journal when we were busy discussing our idea behind the Tri-Chrome dice?? Well, ever since that day all the way up until today I have been hard at work trying to figure out what we can do to guarantee getting this piece in the final production without breaking the bank. I have spoken with our manufacturing liaison, I have spoken to a variety of other manufacturing liaisons along the way, I have made deals & haggles with other manufacturing facilities, and let me tell you, it has been a wild and crazy ride!

So, today we are going to navigate our way through everything that has happened in the making of this dice, where this has lead us, my new and improved moments of insanity, and our hopes for the future! (hooray!).

Tri-Chrome Dice Part #1 :: Who Can Make the Dice?

So, the first major question on the table is simple but complicated. “Who can make the dice”?
~Easy right?
Nope.

I asked around quite literally everywhere that I knew how. I asked all of the manufacturers that I have ever spoken with, I have checked in with some of the people who I have met in the board game making community, and I have sought out some help from contacts that I have never even met up until this moment.

The first major complexity to this issue is that not every manufacturer can make plastic parts. Much of what we have done throughout the history of Librarium Games has been through a manufacturer that focuses on printed media. Whenever we have needed parts for the games, we have sourced them from other manufacturers, imported them to our manufacturer, and then assembled in that facility & shipped out to the USA.

In reaching out for information regarding the custom plastic molds, this has required us to branch out to a very different sector of the manufacturing world. Now, I have stepped a small toe into this pond in the past to try and find information (way back when I was originally considering publishing Gratuity & The Great Chase). So, I reached out to those folks, and I asked for some assistance from our current manufacturer to get new contact information for other facilities in a similar area to where we have worked thus far. This lead me to about x6 different contacts… and so began the march of the haggling…. where I reached out to all of these people to try and get information on production process & costs.

Unfortunately, this took a lot of time (almost 8 weeks of emails all over the world). Also unfortunately, this lead us nowhere near the price points we could afford. Many of these facilities were tossing around numbers as high as $10,000 to produce the custom part & make about x2,000 of them. This is way way too expensive… and it would capsize the project.

In the end, we had one really good contact come up, who offered us a “extremely good deal” on the project. Here are the numbers that he was proposing us:

If you take a moment to digest what these numbers mean, we are looking at a base cost of $3,250 to cover the tooling costs, and then we are looking at approximately $3,400 for 2,000 units & $4,800 for 3,000 units.

In the grand scheme of things, this leaves us with a budget of about $6,600 as our “best offer” for custom manufacturing the dice through a reliable manufacturer. (There were a couple of other offers as low as $4,500 for the dice, but the negotiations and the manufacturing facilities were a bit on the sketchy side, and I was not really willing to even consider these options once I got the info on them). And, while this would save us nearly $4,000 by comparison to the other legitimate offers that we had made to us, it is like… $4,000 more expensive than I had budgeted for before we got the ball rolling on this project as a whole. (and for those of you who have been reading the previous chapters of the design journal, you will notice that this $6,600 cost is going to set us at about $20,000 for the cost of the game as a whole, and that is not acceptable for survival).

Tri-Chrome Dice Part #2 :: What if…….. We Make the Dice?

Now, just so we are on the same page… I have already made a model for this dice. If you know me, you know that this makes me feel like I could take up the gauntlet of making them in bulk (a toxic trait of mine for sure). But… how would that look in reality?

As of right now, the best I can accomplish is using my goofy Ender 3d-printer. to make what you can see in the picture above. This version of the dice came out purely silver in color, with a hefty amount of paint added to flesh out the colors of the dice. (red/yellow/blue/white on the four points & black in the areas underneath the triangles to make them stand out).

Printing these dice out in bulk would not be too too much trouble… but that painting phase is… a completely unrealistic ask for me to do at scale. It would be an insane amount of work AND they don’t even come out that good in the grand scheme of things, because the paint rubs off over time while the dice is used relentlessly.

So… what else is there for options here? I can’t do my own resin molds, I can’t afford the time to paint the corners… is there some other way that I can get these dice made on my end? ~ Time for some more research…

In my hunting I came across this majestic monster.
Something that I had never really conceived to be possible was 3d printing in multiple colors at once. It just so happens that BambuLab felt the same sorts of pains that I had been feeling and decided to invent a machine that could accommodate. But. As you may have noticed, the machine that is allowing the BambuLab to print in multiple colors only holds up to x4 spools of PLA (this is a problem, because our dice would effectively need to be x5 different colors in order to work the way that we want).

Now, at first, I was feeling defeated. Here is the perfect looking solution, but the limitations of the colors still seem to be an issue…. that is… until I did a bit more research about how the BambuLab multi-color printing machines actually work. Turns out, the machine that holds all of the PLA threads is known as a AMS (Automatic Material Switcher). This device feeds different threads into the hot end of the 3d printer in between layers to allow multiple colors to come through in the print at the end. Each AMS machine can hold up to x4 colors… and with a bit of research, it turns out that multiple AMS machines (up to x4) can be fed into one BambuLab printer. this means that with the right resources you could theoretically set up a BambuLab printer with up to x16 different colors to print at one time!!

So that is very exciting… but what is the cost basis looking like? Is this really a more affordable solution in the end? And also… how on earth am I going to set this wild pile of machines up in my house??

Okay, so, with some serious thought (and a few more doodles) it is starting to look like we might be able to assemble this crazy machinery into my desk. I am still a bit unsure about the actual machine logic that is going to go into this, but in terms of the literal measurements, it is at least looking possible within the small space that I actually have. (great news).

Next up though are the realistic costs. What does the budget for this look like & how does it compare to what we have had offered to us in the past so far? Let’s take a look at the raw details:

1. BambuLab x1c 3d Printer (on Black Friday Sale) = ~$1,200
2. AMS Machine = ~$250 each. However! the Bambu x1c comes with x1 AMS included!
3. AMS Switchboard (connects multiple AMS Machines into the 3d Printer) = ~$75
4. PLA Basic Costs = ~$20/spool (we would need… at least x5 spools, upwards of x10?) =~$200
5. Shipping & Handling / Taxes = ~$100

Total Project Cost (Low/High) = $1,700 / $2,000

This is not bad. By comparison to the project costs that we were looking at a few paragraphs ago in this conversation, we would almost automatically be saving something in the vicinity of $3-$4,000 by taking this route. But, this is not all roses…. there are some difficulties we really have to consider here:

0. Can we even make a 3d design in multiple colors?? (is this hard?)
1. We have to make (minimum) x1,000-x2,000 of these dice just to get the initial printrun covered.
2. We need the quality that is as good as if they were manufactured professionally.
3. We have to time this very accurately.
4. We have to consider the risks of going viral… what if we need x10,000 of the dice??
etc. etc.

We have a lot of questions that we cannot even necessarily answer…
Well….
We can actually sort of attempt to answer some of these!
Turns out, BambuLab (like many other 3d printing tech) has its own studio space for setting up their 3d prints to check the specs before actually running a print. This allows you to study your PLA costs & print times & plate orientation. So… before we actually pull the trigger, let’s see what it would take to set up this print the correct way…

So let’s recap here for a minute.

•Right now we are looking at a machine that is x3-4 times cheaper than our best offer for the cost of the dice (and we get to keep the machine after to make other products)

• We can accomplish printing x1,000 dice in approximately 10 days….

It is not looking like there is much of a downside (besides the huge responsibility of actually succeeding at the task of driving the machine the correct way & accepting potentially a huge cost of defeat if we cannot succeed at this process)….

Though it scares the crap out of me… I think we have to do it. We are going to take a huge risk, make a huge leap of faith, and outright cut out one of the middlemen in the manufacturing process to make a better and more affordable product for our player base.

Uh. But the heebee-jeebies on spending $2k on something!

Who Cares. Gotta do it!
Be sure to check in for our next post to see how this decision pans out! And as always thank you so much for reading my friends!!!