Sunday 23 March 2014

Making Saga Dice

Although it's quite possible to play Saga with ordinary D6's, the special Saga dice are part of the "feel" and add to the spectacle.

Sets of Saga dice are not cheap. Not. At. All.

So, if you want four (or more!) sets, it comes to a significant pile of money. So, as per my normal practice, I made my own.

The Saga Forums have the graphics you need, in various forms, so there's not really any clever art to do. At this point, there are obviously a number of options on how to proceed. You could print onto adhesive address labels, onto paper and stick it on, or print onto decal paper, which is what I did.

I imported the graphics into InkScape, and added them onto circles matched (as closely as I could) to the background colours of the dice. By doing this I could print onto white decal paper, which gave me better contrast and opacity. White decal paper is about £1.60 per A4 sheet, and one sheet will do all four sets with enough left over to make an army's worth of shields.

The blank dice came from The Dice Shop, and cost just over nine pounds for all 32 dice to make up the four sets. They do a ton of different colours and sizes in blank dice, so you ought to be able to get anything you want.

Cutting out and decalling up the dice is an easy job, but time consuming. Do it in front of the television, over a night or two. Several coats of clear lacquer sprayed on after the decals are dry protects them in use. The laquer was about four quid for the can, did all these sets,plus  tons of other stuff (measuring sticks and shield decals) and there's still plenty left for other projects.

Ready to roll!

Here are my Anglo-Saxon/Anglo Danish dice, along with my Scots and Norse Gael set. The Viking and Welsh sets will follow when I regain sufficient will and sanity to cut out another 96 decals! You get the idea. All up, the cost shook out at under £15 for all four sets. Works for me...

Merry meet again!

2 comments:

  1. These look fantastic Mitch! I have printed off the symbols as stickers and I have the dice, just haven't got round to putting the two together yet!

    ReplyDelete