Beautifully engraved and recognizable at first glance, Q Workshop gaming dice have been on the shelves of your FLGS for more than a decade. The company motto is “All dice tell a story.” Did you know that the evolution of the company is a good story, itself?

Back in 2004, Q Workshop founder Patryk Strzelewicz was just a young RPG player who noticed that all gaming dice available on the market looked the same — and they didn’t go well with special lighting, painted miniatures, and the usual setting of an imaginative RPG campaign. As a result, he engraved the first Runic Dice Set (on his kitchen table!) and received tremendously positive feedback from players all over the world. Ecstatic with the result, Patryk established Q Workshop and began crafting dice full time.

The next big challenge was to make Q Workshop’s engraving as fine as possible, and after many trials Patryk managed to do it with the first Elven Dice Set. From there, he hopped on to 3D dice, which means reverse-etched dice, until he was able to mass produce designs as complicated as the Dwarven or Celtic 3D dice. This was the moment when Patryk and Q Workshop found their niche. But he was already too keen on going further and producing the most impossible designs, so he couldn’t simply stop there.

The next step was to develop a method to put engravings on the edges of dice as well as on their faces, improving the overall look and “cool factor” of Q-workshop’s dice. It’s still a difficult task, but we think that the Forest Dice Set, which many gamers regard as a work of art rather than an actual rolling dice set, is a good example of that.

In 2011, after many trials, Patryk was finally able to make metal dice, and “Bam!” — the Steampunk metal design won an Origins Award in 2013!

Of course, he wasn’t alone on this adventure. Q Workshop started as a family business, and even now we’re a very small, but very dedicated team. There’s about a dozen individuals managing our distribution channels in our office in Poznan, Poland, and about four dozen working in the manufacturing facility. All our dice are produced in Poland. Do you want to know how they’re made?

Let’s take one of our 2017 releases, the Galactic Dice Set. For some time now we’ve been considering introducing a set with a science-fiction feel, and we planned on doing that in the 2nd Quarter of 2017. We’ve got two graphic artists (they happen to be brothers, too), and one day one of them, our ‘creative ninja’, surprised us with an almost complete design for dice. A couple of e-mails back and forth, some changes to the design (there are always two factors to balance — the aesthetic beauty and legibility), and we were ready to talk about colors.

Did I mention that there’s a dozen of us in the office? Well, that means a dozen color schemes, and another ton of e-mails in which everyone is a fierce advocate of their choice! So, in this case, we decided to let our Facebook fans choose their favorite. We narrowed the color choices to five variations, assembled a 3D visualization, and published the poll on FB. After a few days, two colors emerged as clear winners, so it seemed appropriate to start a new product line with the two preferred color variations.

Also, there was a question of the name. As this was not to be a licensed product, we needed to choose something neutral, but clearly evocative of space travel, advanced technology, and unheard-of adventures. Here, the old-fashioned in-office voting took place. The final duel was between “Galactic” and “Wormhole”, if I recall well... After that, we checked the manufacturing queue to establish the release date, selected the design for boxes, and were primed to announce our new product to the distributors!

There’s that moment when, after months of decision-making, discussing, and defending your opinion (not to mention possible manufacturing glitches) you can finally hold a finished product in your hand. The feeling you get in that moment is a mixture of satisfaction, anxiety (will the customers love the product as much as you do?), and that indescribable feeling of creating something out of nothing. Also, you wonder: what will the future owner of these dice do with them? What adventures will they have together?  Where will they go? Will they be misbehaving at the remote end of the ‘Verse? Will they pass through a Stargate? Or are they going to be used to destroy the Rebellion?

This is just the beginning of the story that all our dice tell, before we bid them goodbye and ship them to the world for you to continue this story on your own.