One thing that all gamers have in common is our love for dice. Heck, Awesome Dice is built on that principle. While a simple 7-dice set of D&D Dice is more than sufficient for killing some orcs or throwing fireballs, there is something in the nature of gamers that makes us want to have more dice. And not just enough extra dice so that we don’t have to reroll — we want different kind of dice, different dice looks. Different dice for different games, or different characters, or even for different situations. Gamers tend to have dice collections, and all of us probably know one gamer with a large dice collection. But let me tell you, they have nothing on Kevin Cook. Let me tell you, I run a dice store and I get a special gamer feeling of awesomeness when I look at all the dice we have in inventory… but I am jealous of Kevin’s dice collection.
Kevin Cook has the largest dice collection in the world. In 2004 he got the Guinness World Record to prove it. At the time he had extensively documented his collection of 11,097 dice… with no duplicates. Literally every single one of those eleven thousand dice were different from every other die. That is impressive. And Kevin didn’t stop and rest on his laurels once he had the Guinness record. At his site, DiceCollector.com, he notes that in August of 2011 he reached his 35,000th die. As he tells it, Kevin’s dice collection started in 1977 with Dungeons & Dragons and expanded from there. It sounds like he started just like any other gamer collecting dice because, well, dice are just cool. And then he realized that he had a lot of dice. From his site:
Like most collectors you have to be of a somewhat obsessive/compulsive nature … one day I found that I had more dice than anyone I had ever heard of so I started searching … After 2 years of extensive internet and library searching I only turned up two “rumors” of larger collections … one was destroyed in the October 17, 1989 San Francisco earthquake … the other I have yet to find info on …
Kevin has many photos on his site showing how all the dice in his collection are stored, and you can see just some of them in the picture above. So what do you do when you have the largest collection of dice in the world? If you’re Kevin, you keep looking for more and more dice to mercilessly grow the collection and you exhaustively document it. But if I had the world’s largest dice collection I can tell you what I would do with it. I would do what every gamer would really want to do deep down in their heart. I would rent a dump truck — literally a giant dump truck — and I would load all of my dice into the truck, drive back and forth a little bit, and then I would roll the world’s largest dice collection all at once. Then I would add up the result and find out exactly what number you get when you roll the world’s largest dice collection. Because that’s just something that I think we need to know! In fact, I’m willing to bet you that if Kevin talked to GenCon they might even provide the dump truck and host the rolling of the largest dice collection as a premiere GenCon event. Who wouldn’t. Maybe make a contest about what the net result of the dice would be. Guess closes and win… some dice! Tell me if that isn’t an awesome idea?
