Luxury dice dominate at Gen Con

polygon.com:

One moment I was at Gen Con, stalking the aisles of the vendor floor for the next big board game. The next moment I was shopping for an engagement ring — or at least that’s what it felt like. A woman with beautiful hands was lifting semi-precious stones out of a brightly-lit glass case, laying these beautiful objects out on a velvet cloth and encouraging me… to roll them.

Luxury has come to tabletop gaming. First it was fancy-ass tables, and this year it was all about dice. At least two vendors — Dispel Dice and Level Up Dice — were hawking sets of polyhedrals that were nearly as expensive as some entire games, and people were standing in line for the opportunity to buy them. The biggest name on the floor was Karen Wang, whose $2.3 million crowdfunding campaign for sharp-edged dice packed with creative inclusions turned heads in 2020. Level Up Dice was also present, its wide selection of semi-precious dice unlike anything else in the hall. Every vendor was at the top of their game, energized by the interest and the momentum of the crowds at tabletop gaming’s Super Bowl.

But it took quite a lot of work to get to there. Wang, for her part, struggled through the pandemic with manufacturing, workflow, and import issues. Level Up CEO Alex Abrate said that many would-be dice makers have simply gone out of business during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

“The problem is that it’s a niche market,” he said, his voice muffled by the mandatory face mask that guests were asked to wear this year. “The problem is that it’s a niche market with very feverish [...] customers. So suddenly, we had all this new generation coming in, looking to monopolize [and] capitalize on the dice industry. And then COVID hit, which meant that there wasn’t