We are very excited that new Mystery Dice by Small Town Dice (the first business venture of Dagny, Libby, Astrid and Daddy Truman) are about to be available! For most folks, knowing that is about enough, and you can stop reading…however I wanted to explain the birth of this secondary business.

First things first, I want to apologize to all the folks that were let down by the Mystery Dice received this Summer. We want the best for our customers, and I was sad and irritated at the changes made to the inventory we most recently received, and I make no excuse for it. This entire new business is us saying we are sorry, and is our best attempt to fix it going forward!

Please note Small Town Dice (and yeah, I just now saw the acronym, doh!) will be supplying awesome dice to STG, with over 250 styles in stock or en route. Small Town Games should shortly have the largest selection of dice in Middle Tennessee! The only reason it is delineated from STG is that it will also be an online business (which is almost ready to launch).

Mystery Dice for the first part of the year were the #1 non-CCG product in the store, by a wide margin. Everyone loved them, and I loved working with the company we were buying them from (Foam Brain Games).

Around July, when we first started trying to get our ducks in a row for Christmas, I worried Mystery Dice might go out of stock due to the supply chain issues, so I placed a huge order (250 sets) to make sure we didn’t run out for the holidays.

The challenges started after that…we received the dice from that order and started selling them. Very quickly we noticed that the variety of dice in this bigger order (my largest previous order was 50 sets) was very small. In many cases, people would open multiple sets of the same dice set consecutively. I even went and pulled packs from different parts of the shipment, with the same results. For what had been our best non-CCG product, this was concerning, but having worked with Foam Brain, I assumed they would jump on the problem and fix it, maybe offering to have us ship back a big portion of the shipment and reship them with a greater variety of dice.

So I went on to FBG’s Facebook page and wrote a little note, asking if they’d help me resolve the problem. Their response was less than satisfactory, them simply saying there were supply chain problems and they didn’t have many different sets to offer.

Having been in eCommerce for many years, IMO they should have simply stopped selling Mystery Dice until the problem was resolved, and should not have shipped out hundreds of units of an inferior product than everyone here was used to. There was no offer to have us exchange some sets or anything. Having made a significant investment in a large quantity of dice that were now not selling, we were stuck.

Very soon after that I hatched the idea of Small Town Dice. If the company I wanted to support wouldn’t support us, I figured we could do it ourselves. I knew it would be a significant investment and a ton of work to deliver the quality that I wanted at the price I wanted, but I think we’re there. Plus, I thought it would be a good way to spend some time with my daughters.  I want them to grow up working and learning and being creative, so I thought this would be a good way to start them out. Dice and fun, colorful, inherently mathematic. I really wanted to launch a whole lot sooner than we have, but as with everyone, life is busy.

So my twins have both been hard at work helping me inventory and organize our new dice bin system at STGAD, and I just got our first batch of Mystery Dice labels printed. Now all that’s left is to pack them up and bring them to the store!  Astrid, our youngest, will be doing the packing to guarantee overwhelming Mysteriousness!

So how are the new Small Town Mystery Dice better than the previous version?

First, when there is a middle-man, there is always the cost associated with that middleman. So instead of buying from Foam Brain, we are now purchasing from Foam Brain’s manufacturer as well as several other new sources of product.  This lets us offer a better product at very close to the same price.  More dice, the same or better quality, just with our Brand on them instead of theirs. Yes, we have to buy lots more because we are getting them wholesale and that’s tied up a bunch of capital, but I think its worth it to serve our peeps and to launch this new venture.

The biggest bonus is we are getting to bump the quality of Mystery Dice significantly. Where Foam Brain used to offer only a specific tier of acrylic dice and metals, our Mystery Dice have a much broader band of pricing, from their same cool acrylics, but up to and including what are normally $15 and $18 resin sets, including the first time we’ll have occlusion dice (dice with things inside of them!) in the mix. This also allows us to guarantee there are no duplicates in each 50 or 100 dice sets, woot!!  On top of that, we are adding some much higher end metals to the mix for the solo metal dice, including from new $30-$40 high end sets that aren’t even offered in the store yet. Also cool, for our initial run, 1 in 10 sets will have an awesome collectible tiny metal sword. And as the icing on the cake, 1 of the 100 sets will be a full set of semi-precious Turquoise Dice that are just stunning (MSRP $70). As I said, Astrid is packing these, so I won’t even know where those dice are, and you are just as likely to get it in the first pack as the last. We’re bumping the price to $10.99, but these packs of Mystery Dice are packed to the gills with much higher value (over double).

I hope that all makes sense!  If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please let me know!