Kraken Dice Woes

As I’ve mentioned in some previous posts, I am a big fan of tabletop gaming. D&D, Pathfinder, Seventh Sea, whatever gets people around the table having fun–and usually rolling dice. We love dice. Nikki and I have dozens of sets built up over the years. So, when Kraken Dice launched their Iconic Mythical Collection Kickstarter, we bought in. I’d heard of Kraken; these weren’t some Johnny-come-lately-fly-by-night operators. My money should have been in good hands.

Fast forward 15 months. Our dice arrived today (six months late) and, like the many people who left their comments on that afore-linked Kickstarter, we are deeply disappointed. There is nothing for it now: the very nature of Kickstarter is investing in a product without knowing what you’ll get. But Kraken’s approach to this effort, their repeated delays, miscommunications and overall quality of the product forces me to write about it here, in the forum most available to me. If you care not about the matter, you may bow out now.

We purchased, in total, 13 sets of dice. Whether that seems excessive to you, this was a special thing for us. But I throw out that number so that the following statement carries more weight. Not one of our dice sets matched the images and product that Kraken offered in their Kickstarter. One set came somewhat close: the standard Fairy set. Our other standard (layered) set, the Dragon Egg, was pale, faded, and lacked contrasting colors. That proved to be a common theme with the rest of our dice which were the “ethereal” variety.

Can you, even with the assistance of the Kraken Kickstarter, identify the eight sets of dice I’ve pulled D20s from here? Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Give up? It was a trick question. There are only four sets here. Each set came with two D20, and I have stacked them on top of each other here. (By the way, left to right, they are Ethereal Kraken, Ethereal Saberwolf, Ethereal Hydra and Ethereal Banshee.) That’s right, the D20s in the first column came from the same bag. That also goes for the two D20s in the third column. Notice how pale and almost colorless the dice on top are. The second column are a bit closer. The fourth column are almost identical. That’s good. If only they looked anything like they were supposed to. This was the set I was most intrigued by: the Ethereal Banshee, which actually glows in the dark. And mine did glow! However, the dice themselves are clouded, muddied and lacking in any of the distinct pattern Kraken offered.

And there’s a reason for that. Kraken, in violation of Kickstarter’s policies on honesty, used photorealistic renders to show what the dice should look like. These renders look magnificent. No wonder so many people, including us, pledged. And I have not seen any pictures that show that the dice delivered to any person are what were offered.

Here’s another set I was looking forward to: the Ethereal Dragon. The swirls in this one are quite nice, and some of them come close to the render. Not perfect, but close. The problem is, it’s supposed to have two colors, purple and green. Where’s the green? Oh, sure, you can see a really tiny splash of it on some of the dice, but it’s practically absent.

The same goes for the Living Spell set, which was a hyped up set created by “Maze Arcana.” The renders on this were gorgeous, a bizarre yet workable fusion of yellow and pink/purple. Where’s my other color? All I get here is faint gold swirls. Super, super disappointing.

Perhaps my biggest disappointment comes from the set I was most looking forward to: Ethereal Phoenix. I have a particular fondness for red/orange/yellow style sets. The campaign shows tantalizing wisps of red and yellow in a beautiful clear resin base die. We ordered two of this and between them, I still can’t make one set that approximates what was offered. The best dice are shown up top here, and some of them are nice. But the others were just as off the mark as what I’ve already shown. And of the 4 D20s, there’s not one of them that I would trust to pull my character’s fat out of the fire–or put the other players’ fat into it.

The bottom line is that while I acknowledge the risks of Kickstarter, I feel this project has been mismanaged at virtually every step since its completion and I am saddened by the result and feel a little taken advantage of. Each of our bags of dice was marked with a different number from 1 to 6 (even those from the same sets), indicating what I suspect was some sort of inspection or quality control marking. To think that anyone looked at these and thought they were fine to send along is appalling. Kraken Dice has essentially forever lost the business of my household. I will be sticking to other mainstays like Chessex, as well as some new possibilities like Random Encounter Dice, and I hope you do as well, or else let the buyer beware.

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