I’m not a collector of dice. I like them, but my general attitude is that I have plenty and probably don’t need more. That said, I love weird stuff and Pandora’s Dice Wheel is pretty weird. When I came across ads for it in old Dragon Magazines a few years back, I knew I had to have one. I created an eBay alert and waited. And waited. And waited.
There aren’t many of these out there. I remarked on this to Clay Fleischer, who of course was like, “Oh, I think I have one of those.” And he did. So I bought it off him. What arrived was a plastic dice wheel in a nondescript cardboard box bearing a gold sticker labeled “Pandora’s Treasures.” In addition to the wheel, it also had a folded sheet of paper with instructions and a custom crit/fumble chart, which is pretty neat.
All these years, I expected the sword to spin, but I was wrong – the wheel spins and the sword acts as a pointer for the results. One spin gets you results for nine dice: D3, D4, D6, D8, D10, D12, D20, D30 and D100. It is a little hard to parse your result and there isn’t a ton of tension on the wheel to guard against jostling. Still, it does feel nice to spin. I love it, but I probably wouldn’t want to use it in a game.
Weirdly, a week after I bought Clay’s, a friend out west found a box for another Pandora’s Dice Wheel and sent it my way. This one is a professional printed box with some nice art and it contained a fun little ad sheet with an illustration of some adventurers gathered round the wheel – my guess was this was held to the back of the box by the shrink wrap. No wheel inside, though.
As you can see from the ad copy though, there was a deluxe version made of hardwood and brass (god, I want one so bad) and the company had custom options too. I haven’t been able to figure out when these were first available, but I think there is a good chance that they were the first custom wood tabletop game accessories on the market, which would make them a kind of forerunner of all the wooden game screens and dice towers and miniature vaults available today.
