The geek shall inherit the Earth...

This page will document various knickkancks I have invented which might appeal to the geek, the nerd, the dork, or any other flavor of misfit you align yourself with. You'll probably either get a chuckle out of the things here or you'll just not "get it." If you fall into the former category and think some of these things are really nifty... email me and we can talk price. I can usually make more of these things.

In many ways the things on this page are inspired by or closely related to many of the puzzle ideas I develop.

So far, on this page you'll find:

Dice

 Below are some original dice I have created myself (using a laser cutter to engrave blank dice). If you are looking for custom dice designs for any reason, email me and we can discuss price.

MATHd6

 I grew up playing tabletop role-playing games, including 1st edition AD&D (I still have all of my old modules and DRAGON magazines). I don't play anymore, but if I ever needed to roll up stats for a new character, I have created the ultimate geek-dice for just such a task: math-dice. Instead of dice with numbers one though six on them, I've designed three six-sided dice (blue, green, and red) with various mathematical expressions on them which equal the numbers 1-6.

These are not your friendly, school-supply-store-dice to teach adding and subtracting. Screw that. If you want to know what number you've rolled, you better be fluent in calculus, matrix theory, probability, trigonometry, and modulo arithmetic. If you're lucky a die might land face up with "1+4" on it, or maybe just a square or cubic root. To the right is a picture of the dice, and here is a PDF file showing the expressions used on all of the faces. The dice are 5/8" (16mm) in size. And yes, opposite faces add up to the fifth root of 16807.

So, if your Dungeon Master can't calculate an infinite series or trignometric functions, I guess he'll just have to take your word on how high that Agility Score really is.

Note: I have licensed these math dice to Game Station. As they now have exclusive rights to produce and sell them, I will not be selling them on my site (I'll put a direct link to them as soon as they have them available).

I have other dice which I still produce and sell on my own:

Brick Dice

I'm betting there's a fairly large overlap between LEGO-geeks and game-playing-geeks. For that audience I present these "brick dice". Instead of digits 1-6 on the faces, I have building block representations with one to six "studs" showing. The "5" side was tricky since there is not a standard 1x5 brick, so I depicted a 1x2 plate with a 3-stud L-brick next to it (the other digits are represented by a 1x1, 1x2, 1x3, 2x2, and 2x3 brick). These come in a set of 5 colored dice as shown.

Note that these are in no way "official" products of the LEGO company (or any other construction toy company), these are products of me, Eric Harshbarger.

Smiley Die

Another custom die I designed. I have no idea how this could be useful, but I just liked the idea of covering the six square sides of a die with perfectly round emoticons. The interior of the die is made of white resin which did not contrast very well with the bright yellow surface after engraving, so I inked the etched faces by hand with a fine-point black Sharpie marker.

Maybe if you are confused as to how you should react to some particular bit of news, you could roll this die and let Lady Luck decide for you. Here are the moods you might roll.

Decision Dice

These dice were originally designed for a friend of mine who requested a die to help her make decisions. I made two version, each with different responses, some negative so affirmative. Therefore, you can roll both (to get two differing opinions). For a more quantified answer I also included a number of plus or minus signs under the expressions (to indicate the relative severity of the response). So, you can roll both dice and see if the combined result is over all more positive or negative.

Of course, I would not advise using these to dictate important decisions in your life; they are for entertainment purposes only.

Chess Dice

Six different chess pieces, six sides on a die. This one was a no-brainer. I'm not sure how often people this to themselves, "gee, I wish this game of chess had more chance in it." But if someone does think that, I have the dice for them.

Puzzles

 More of my puzzle creations may be found elsewhere on my website.

Cryptex

 This is best demonstrated via YouTube video.

Geometric Models

Basswood Bucky

 I'm a math-geek too. In fact, I'm an "official" math-geek in that I studied the subject in college enough to earn a couple of degrees in the field. By far geometry was my favor topic, and this model is just the first of many I expect to create with my newly-acquired laser cutter.

Mathematically the shape is known as a "truncated icosahedron" (the pentagonal faces are omitted). Many chemists know it as a "buckyball" as it's the form of some carbon molecule or something. Most folks would probably say, "it looks like a soccer ball!" And they'd be right... a soccer ball, too, has 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons.

Icosadodecahedron