Red Jasper Dice with Copper

This project has been around for quite some time as we have been looking for a way to offer semi precious stone dice that could stand up to the rigors of play. We don’t make shelf queens. Our dice are made to game and we back that up with a lifetime warranty. Most semi precious stone dice proved to chip easily and wouldn’t hold up to regular use. That’s no bueno.

So how did we get around stones natural propensity to chip? Simple – we cheated. This new line of dice have been crafted from semi precious stone set in a resin matrix. The end result is flawless in execution, beauty, gameability (if that’s not a word, it is now). By binding the ground semi precious stone in a resin matrix, it adds a toughness to the resulting die that unaltered stone just doesn’t have while retaining all the visual properties and heft of the original stone.

These particular dice are made from Jasper then inlaid with Copper. Jasper was first worked somewhere between 4000 – 5000 B.C. these early examples of Jasper seem to be primarily used as tips for ancient bow drills. Jasper was one of the favorite gemstones of antiquity. It was used to make signet rings for producing seals as early as 1800 BC in Crete and Figurines such as the hippo you see photographed here during Egypt’s Middle Kingdom around 2000 B.C. Jasper has been found on archaeological digs from Knossos, to Egypt, all across Europe and even the Far East.

Egyptian Middle Kingdom Jasper Hippopotamus courtesy of Antiques.com

Today Jasper is found all around the world. Specific colors in various forms of Jasper are developed due to contaminates in the opaque quartz that makes up the Jasper family of stones. The red coloration you see in these dice as well as the this Brecciated Red Jasper stone on the left, occur due to iron contamination. Jasper comes in an entire rainbow of colors with fanciful names such as forest fire or porcelain jasper and each coloration or variation in pattern is a result of volcanic re circulation that brought these stones to the surface. Jasper will also develop a highly colorized crust or rind due to weathering of those contaminates once on the surface.