Last month I reviewed two other dice sets by this company, from their Elven and Call of Cthulhu lines. These are two more sets, both from the same material and cast to the same excellent standards.

First up are the Japanese dice, a set of five ten-sided dice with tiny Japanese calligraphy at the edge of each face and the numbers one to ten written in kanji. Very pretty and absolutely perfect for the pretentious White Wolf gamer in your life who pretends that he/she knows Japanese.

I like the concept of the skull dice, but not the execution. The design is a mass of teeny-tiny skulls, piled up together like an early Chapman Brothers piece with the numbers overlaid on this background. However, the numbers just aren’t clear enough. After an even distribution, the most important thing about a die is the ability to read the number. It’s fine on the six-sider, but by the time you get to the twenty-sider... I only figured out the “fourteen” because it had a “seven” on the opposite side.

So, don’t buy the skull dice. Instead, take a short trip to their website, click on the “Elven Dice”, then on “3-color”. Now those dice are works of art – almost enough to make me a collector.