Zocchihedron

Lore & Background

It took three years for Zocchi to design his die, and three more years to get it into production. Since its introduction, Zocchi has improved the design of the Zocchihedron, filling it with teardrop-shaped free-falling weights to make it settle more swiftly when rolled. The Zocchihedron II is a further improved model and has another filler.

Reader's Guide

The Zocchihedron introduced a novel way to generate percentage rolls in role-playing games, offering a single-die alternative to the traditional two-d10 percentile method. Its spherical design with flattened spots and internal weights aimed to improve rolling dynamics. However, early tests published in White Dwarf magazine revealed a substantially uneven frequency distribution; Jason Mills performed 5,164 rolls and found that numbers near the 'poles' (very high and very low) came up significantly less often than those near the 'equator'. Gateways magazine similarly found that on hard surfaces the die favored equatorial numbers, though on soft surfaces the internal weights allowed it to pass Chi-Square testing for even distribution. In response, the numbering was redesigned to spread high and low numbers more evenly across the die, though numbers near the poles still appear less often. The original design patent expired in 2003, and a later utility patent (U.S. 6,926,276) may have protected the braking mechanism of the Zocchihedron II, expiring in 2025.

Did You Know?

• The Zocchihedron is sometimes called 'Zocchi's Golfball' due to its appearance.
• It took three years to design and three more years to get into production.
• A test of 5,164 rolls by Jason Mills showed that numbers near the poles came up less often than those near the equator.
• The Zocchihedron II contains a different filler from the original.