It's Jamie here from the Mini Museum team. You may have received information about our latest crowdfunding campaign Roll With History, a new joint project with FanRoll Dice to incorporate authentic Mini Museum Collection specimens inside beautiful tabletop gaming dice.
Last week, I posted update on the Age of Dinosaurs crowdfunding campaign. I figured I'd share it here as well. If you read that update, you can skip this one because it's basically the same message. If you missed it, enjoy a little Mini Museum rambling by yours truly. This will be the last one like this, I promise. 😅
As always, thank you for your patience and support. Sharing science and history is never easy work and crowdfunding projects are twice as hard. We try to make things interesting and relevant but life is busy and there is a lot going on in the world. Still, it sometimes feels like we are bothering people with endless updates. I back a lot of campaigns myself and so I get it. I also appreciate when creators take a moment to acknowledge the challenge and thank the backers old and new.
📸 Dinosaur Fossil Dice from Roll with History (Triceratops D6 in Focus)
So, Why Dice?
It's a great question, and the answer comes from a place we’ve been thinking about a lot lately. First, we think the world could use more science and history in everyday life, and more moments of shared wonder. We've explored this through jewelry, books, and other collaborative projects. This project is one small way of adding to that conversation.
📸 All the dice in Roll with History, Dinosaurs, Campo del Cielo, and Chain Mail
But there's always more than that with Mini Museum. There's a big picture too and that picture revolves around the underlying promise of Mini Museum, which is to say that history, time, and reality are best understood through direct, physicalcontact. We try to encourage this by making meaningful collections designed to provide a sense of one's place in the universe, connecting the present directly with moments and materials far outside everyday experience.
📸 Prepping T. rex specimens for D20 inclusion
In contrast, dice are meant to be handled as the centerpiece of interactive gameplay that involves storytelling and a shared connection with others. In that sense, they're dynamic in a way that is very different from our typical collections. We found this combination really intriguing and it inspired us to see what might be possible by merging wonderandfun.
📸 Someone's having fun!
The result is an object that captures a piece of the past inside an object designed to be used in the present. In this way, the artifact becomes something more than an item to study and transforms into a new kind of experience you engage with in a different context… hopefully an experience you share with others because that's really what Mini Museum is all about.
📸 Close-up of the T. rex D20
To bring this project to life, we're teaming up with the premier dice experts at FanRoll Dice. Together, we crafted a full dice set with seven dinosaur fossils, a solo D20 with the Campo del Cielo meteorite, and another D20 with a fragment of 15th-century chain mail from the Second Edition.
The result is a new way of encountering history, where the past is explored through interaction. Oh, and they're also pretty cool... 😎
📸 Close-Ups of all the dice in the Roll with History Collection (Campo, Chain Mail, and seven different Dinosaurs 🦕)
As noted above, the campaign is live right now. The dice are available in many different configurations. We also have some fun add-ons to enhance gameplay. We hope you'll drop by and say hello!
