custom dice: oh, they're expensive?

A tweet I saw yesterday sparked some thoughts on my game involving custom dice.

@Crash_Games custom dice = $2,200 up front and about 2.8 cents each at 250,000 quantity...Or so...So, yeah, expensive for small runs.
— Tasty Minstrel Games (@TastyMinstrel) March 21, 2012

(Side note: If anyone knows how to properly imbed a tweet within a Blogger post, please let me know.)

Oh really? Ouch.

My dice game, as is, requires 4 unique dice per dice type. That's 16 - 20 unique dice. Assuming the $2,200 is per unique die, that's roughly $35,000 to $45,000 for set up costs.

That will never happen.

For reasons like this, it's important for a designer to know the costs of production before they dive too far into a design. Unfortunately, it takes some leg work, and personally, I'd rather be designing. It's helpful to follow conversations on Twitter and from the BGG game design forums for this very reason.

As for my design, I came up with what is hopefully a solution to the problem. Instead of 4 unique dice per type, there would just be 4 unique dice. Essentially, all the dice were the same across types. So instead of having the unique icons for each type, the dice would display "primary" and "secondary" icons. The type of the dice is still signified by its color. There would have to be a legend that indicated what the primary and secondary icons were for each type.

It's not as ideal as a bunch of custom dice, but it should be would be much cheaper!