The New Yorker: The Dice You Never Knew You Needed.

“[T]wo scientists from the Dice Lab, Robert Fathauer and Henry Segerman, débuted their newest specimen, fresh from the petri dish. They had invented – or, rather, discovered; no, really they’d just inexplicably gone to the trouble of creating – a die with a hundred and twenty sides. “What do you use it for?“ Fathauer asked the audience. “We have no idea,“ he answered. Futility notwithstanding, the d120 is billed as the “ultimate fair die allowed by Mother Nature (i.e., mathematics!),“ since a die couldn’t, practically speaking, possess more sides or more symmetry, and dice must be symmetrical to be fair.”

Watch the d120 in action on YouTube.

You can susbstitute the d120 for any dn in which n is a proper factor of 120; here’s a handy chart for this use.

Even though I don’t play any games that require more than a d6 or two and even though already own a d8, d12, d24, d30 (alphabet with 4 wildcards) and a d100 that I almost never use, I somehow feel like I need to also have a d120.

Links via MetaFilter: Or, disdyakis triacontahedron.