Introducing The Septem Alea, Our New Colour Mixing Dice

We have spent years making objects that filter light rather than simply reflect it, and a gaming table felt like the obvious next place for that idea to land. Dice already carry a strange kind of magic. Roll one and you hand a decision over to chance. We wanted to see what happened if that same roll also carried a small experiment in colour, so that every throw of the dice was doing two things at once: deciding an outcome, and quietly demonstrating subtractive colour mixing along the way.

The Shapes We Chose, and Why They Have to Be This Way

The Septem Alea includes the full traditional set, a d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20 and d100, and none of those shapes are arbitrary. For a die to roll fairly, every face has to be identical in size and shape, and every vertex has to sit the same distance from the centre. Shapes built to that rule are called Platonic solids, and there are exactly five of them: the tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron and icosahedron. Euclid proved mathematically around 300 BCE that a sixth one could never exist. Four of our seven dice map straight onto those solids. The other two, the d10 and d100, are built from a pentagonal trapezohedron instead, a shape engineered specifically to solve the problem of rolling a fair ten sided number, since ten does not divide evenly into any of Plato's five.

It is worth remembering how new the modern dice set actually is. When Dungeons and Dragons first went to print in 1974, it did not come with dice at all. Early players sourced a five piece set from classroom maths suppliers and inked the numbers on by hand. The ten sided die was not invented until 1980. Every dice bag on every gaming table today, including ours, is carrying that whole history of trial and error inside it.

Here is where The Septem Alea does something no dice set has done before. Colour usually reaches your eye one of three ways: light bending apart through a prism or raindrop, light scattering across the sky, or light interfering with itself across a soap bubble's thin film. There is a fourth way, and it is the one built into every CMY Cube. Selective absorption. A translucent cyan surface lets blue and green light through and holds back red. Magenta lets red and blue through and holds back green. Yellow lets red and green through and holds back blue. Layer two of these colours over each other and a new colour appears, not because light was added, but because more of it was taken away. This is subtractive colour mixing, the same physics behind every printed photograph, and we have cast it directly into seven dice. Hold one to a window and watch the light shift colour as it passes through. Roll a handful together and their overlapping faces run a small, uncontrolled colour mixing experiment right there on the table.

What Is In the Box

Each Septem Alea set includes the seven dice in colour mixing resin, a rigid spectrum edged display box with a windowed lid and foam insert, and a holographic CMY Cubes drawstring pouch for carrying the set from table to table. This is a numbered, limited run. When the last set is cast, The Septem Alea retires for good.

If you already know CMY Cubes, you will recognise the logic straight away. The Original Cube started this whole idea: hold it to a window and watch cyan, magenta and yellow filter the light passing through each face. The Ignis, The Aether, The Mundus and The Motus took that same principle and carried it through the other four Platonic solids, one element each. The Septem Alea is the first time that idea has left the shelf and joined a game in progress. It is not a cube reshaped into a novelty. It is the same colour seal, the same optically clear, diamond polished material, cast into the seven shapes a gaming table actually needs.

That makes it a slightly different kind of CMY Cubes object. Most of our range sits somewhere between a desk piece and a sensory tool, something you pick up, turn over, and put back down. The Septem Alea is designed to be used. It gets shaken in a hand, rattled in a dice cup, and thrown across a table hundreds of times over a single campaign, so it has to be as durable as it is translucent. Every roll doubles as a reminder that the object in your hand is filtering light exactly the way any CMY Cube does, just now with a number attached to the outcome.

Who It Is For

The Septem Alea suits dungeon masters who like their table looking as good as it plays, collectors chasing something no other dice maker has done, and curious minds who cannot resist holding an object up to a window to see what it does to the light. It also makes a distinctive gift for anyone already deep into tabletop gaming and looking for a set that is genuinely different from another speckled or metallic finish. Because the run is numbered and limited, each set carries its own small piece of scarcity along with the science.

The Septem Alea is for dungeon masters, dice collectors, and anyone who has ever wondered what happens when cyan meets magenta on a natural 20. We built it because it felt like the right next place for our colour science to live, in the hands of people already gathered around a table to play.