Game Accessories Past Sleeves and Dice
The game accessories chart is dice, dice trays, table mats, score pads and a card holder for small hands: a list of what a game table wears out.
On the plain of Iðavöllr the gods built their halls and played at tables with golden pieces. Then Ragnarök. The poem does not say the game survived. It says that afterwards, in the new grass, the survivors found the golden pieces again.
The game ends. The pieces are what you find in the grass.
The chart is dice, trays and mats
Amazon’s game accessories chart, read this morning, is not sleeves and deck boxes. We covered those on this door already, from the far side of a game shop counter, and they live on the card-games chart. The accessories chart is what a table wears out:
- Dice at one, two, six, ten, twelve, sixteen, seventeen and nineteen. Plain six-sided sets, bulk bags of coloured dice, and three polyhedral sets for role-playing tables. Seven of the top twenty places, eight if you count the dice cup.
- Dice trays and cups at eight and fifteen.
- Table mats at eleven, thirteen and eighteen. All three are mahjong mats, which tells you which game’s players are most organised.
- Score pads at four, with the highest rating on the chart at 4.9.
- A card holder for small hands at fourteen.
- One actual game at nine, Qwixx, which is a dice game that got filed with its own accessories.
What a table actually wears out
Games do not wear out. Boxes get soft at the corners, but the game inside is the same game in ten years. What a table goes through is the small stuff around the game, and the chart is a list of it:
Dice go missing. Not break, not wear out. Every game that ships with dice ships with exactly enough, and the first one under the sofa ends the game. That is why a set of five plain dice is the number one accessory on Amazon, and why the fifty-piece bulk bag is number two.
Tables get argued over. The dice tray, the dice cup and the mat all exist to settle the same argument: where does the die land, and does it count. A mat also stops the noise, which is the part the neighbours care about.
Score sheets run out. A pad of a hundred and twenty tear-off sheets at 4.9 stars is the most quietly perfect product on the list. It is not clever. It is the thing the game box ran out of.
Hands differ. The card holder at fourteen is on the chart because a game table has a five-year-old and a grandparent at it, and both of them want to hold a real hand of cards.
Where these picks came from, honestly
Read off Amazon’s own game accessories chart this morning, rank, rating and review count together, best-sellers first. Research picks, with one thing to add: the earlier article on this door, on sleeves and deck boxes, came from four years behind a game shop counter, and that experience says the same thing the chart says. The accessories a shop reorders are the ones that leave the table, not the ones that fail.
The one honest warning
The playmat in our own picture is not on this chart, and that is worth saying plainly. Card-game playmats belong to the card-games world and sell there; on the accessories chart the mats are mahjong mats, three of them, and they are for a different table. If you came here for a neoprene mat for a card game, buy one, but do not take its absence from this chart as a verdict on it. The chart measures what people buy under this heading, not what a table needs.
The second half of the warning is the bulk dice. Fifty coloured dice for the price of a sandwich are a fine purchase for a classroom and a poor one for a serious game: they are light, unbalanced, and the paint on the pips wears in a year. Buy the plain white set for the games that count, and the bulk bag for the ones that do not.
The picks
Bicycle 5-dice set, standard 16 mm six-sided
Number one on the game accessories chart, 4.8 stars across twelve thousand ratings, and dice hold seven of the top twenty places. Five plain white dice with black pips from the playing-card company. This is the thing every game box eventually loses, and the reason it sells is that a game night with four dice is a game night that stops.
- Best for
- Replacing the dice that walked off, Yahtzee, and every board game that came with two and needed three.
- Watch out
- They are casino-style dice with sharp square corners, which is the accurate kind and the kind that skitters off a table. Older hands and small hands want the rounded ones, which are the fifty-piece bulk sets further down the chart.
SIQUK folding hexagon dice trays, PU leather, 2-pack
Number eight, 4.7 stars across eight thousand ratings. A dice tray is the accessory that solves the problem the number-one product creates: dice that leave the table. It snaps flat for the bag, unfolds into a walled hexagon, and stops the argument about whether a die that landed on the floor counts.
- Best for
- Any game with dice, any table with a drink on it, and role-playing groups where one rolling tray per player keeps the middle of the table clear.
- Watch out
- PU leather is plastic with a texture, and the snaps are the first thing to go. It is a good cheap tray, not an heirloom, and the two-pack is two because one of them will stay in someone else's bag.
CiaraQ polyhedral dice set for tabletop role-playing
Number ten, and the most-reviewed thing on the chart: 4.8 stars across twenty thousand ratings. Seven-die sets in bulk, which is how a table of five new players gets equipped without anyone spending real money on their first set. Three of the top twenty places are polyhedral dice, and this is the one people buy for the whole group.
- Best for
- A new table, a teacher's game club, and the person who runs the game and owns the spare dice.
- Watch out
- Bulk acrylic dice are not balanced and the numbers are painted, not inlaid, so they wear. That is fine for a first set and wrong for someone who will care in a year. Nobody at the table needs to know, but the game master should.
Gamewright Little Hands playing card holder
Number fourteen, 4.8 stars across eleven thousand ratings, and the one accessory on the chart that exists for a person rather than for a game. A curved holder that fans a hand of cards for a child too small to hold them, or for anyone whose hands have stopped cooperating. It is the reason a five-year-old can play a real card game with the family instead of a version of one.
- Best for
- Kids from about three up, grandparents with arthritis, and any card game with more than five cards in a hand.
- Watch out
- It holds standard-size cards. Oversized kids' decks and small European cards both fall out, and it is a single holder, so a family with two small players needs two.
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