Funding the Dream
Raising money and launching a business are daunting tasks. Since 2011, Richard Bliss has hosted a wide array of guests who bring their expertise in all areas of business.
With a heavy focus on the board game industry, Richard and his guests have taught thousands of people how to fund their dreams.
Join Richard and his next guest as you look to build and grow your own business.
Funding the Dream
EP 338 How Physical Rolls Sync Seamlessly With Online Play
A roll that matched twice—once on-screen and once at the table—sparked a wild idea: what if your physical dice could post their results straight to your virtual game? We sit down with Scott Strong of Order of the Dice to explore the Vision Dice Tower, a computer vision device that reads your real rolls and syncs them into platforms like Roll20. No more arguing with streaky RNG, no more losing the tactile thrill of a toss, just the satisfying clatter of dice backed by trusted results in your online session.
Scott walks us through the journey from aha moment to pre-beta prototype: a sensor-triggered snapshot, a model that recognizes die type and face value with about 99.5% accuracy on standard dice, and a clean pipeline that posts outcomes to your character sheet. We talk about why pseudorandom generators can erode confidence, how physical rolls restore fairness, and what it takes to design hardware that 3D prints today and scales to injection molding tomorrow. Along the way, we dig into smart Kickstarter strategy—setting a realistic goal to cover manufacturing, using guerrilla outreach to build the first crowd, and stacking stretch goals that actually matter to players.
The roadmap is where things get exciting: support for more VTTs beyond Roll20, better recognition for ornate dice, app refinements that log and audit rolls, and future formats that fit different tables. The bigger vision reaches beyond dice—bridging tactile moments from the physical table into the virtual space so remote friends keep the feel, the rhythm, and the trust that make game night magic. If you love the weight of a D20 but need the reach of online play, this conversation shows how both worlds finally meet.
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Welcome to the show. I'm your host. You're listening to Funding the Dream. And it's great to have you. I'm great to be back and enjoy your presence. Now, today I have a guest. I'm always excited about my guests because I learned something interesting and they bring interesting things. That's why I have interesting guests. And today is no exception. Now, our guest today, he and I have known each other for about two years through work. Uh, randomly, we live a thousand miles apart, yet work brought us together a thousand miles from where we both live. So that is that's one of the things. So I'm joined by Scott Strong. Scott is with the Order of the Dice. Scott, welcome to the show.
SPEAKER_00:Well, thank you, Richard. I appreciate it.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I appreciate it because you reached out to me, right? Um, and I gotta admit, I was a little surprised because I knew you in one setting and you reached out to me for a completely different setting. What prompted you to do that?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so um I actually have been working on a side project. So you and I know each other from through work. Through work. You came and did this awesome presentation. I've been following your texts that you send out as updates every week to help me be more efficient in my my day job. And I have a group of friends that have been working together on a side project, and we've been doing that for probably about nine to ten months, where we've just been in the background working on this, and we are we've launched a Kickstarter. And the reason I was reaching out is I was trying to think of any way that I could get my message out to people. And so I started to go into LinkedIn and figured that you are somebody who has who has a lot of connections.
SPEAKER_01:So yeah, I got a lot of connections, but wait a minute. So you didn't know that I had a uh influence in the board game industry?
SPEAKER_00:I did not, not at the time.
SPEAKER_01:Really? I thought that's why you reached out is because hey, I know Richard through work, but he does this thing with board games. Well, that is surprising. No, uh the the podcast you're currently on is Funding the Dream on Kickstarter. It's been running for since 2011. So what are we up to? 15 years now, took a little bit of a hiatus. So I thought that you were like, oh, hey, Richard's into board games. I got this little thing that does with games. I'll call Richard. Okay. So there you go. Interesting. I had no idea. Okay, let's talk about your project. Because what we're what we're gonna do is your project is currently on Kickstarter as of the recording of this episode. It is interesting to me because it has something to do with gaming, board gaming, uh, RPGs, tabletop gaming. And I found it fascinating because it's a blend between old school and new school. So let's talk about the project. It's called what do you call it? The Vision Dice Tower, right? That's what we call it.
SPEAKER_00:Correct. It's called the Vision Dice Tower. And it is something that happened, like I said, about nine or ten months ago. My friends and I, we love playing DD. We play together in person and we play virtually. We just happened to be in person and we had an aha moment, and we turned that aha moment into the Vision Dice Tower. And that moment happened when one of my friends and one of the co-founders of Order of the Dice, he had accidentally clicked on his virtual character sheet in DD Beyond, and he rolled his physical dice at the same time. So both virtual and physical dice were rolled at the same time, and they came up with the exact same number. And we looked at each other and we're like, wouldn't it be cool if you could actually do that? And we're like, wait a second, nobody's doing this. What if we did this? And then it and that's what was the beginning of the Vision Dice Tower.
SPEAKER_01:Now, I gotta tell you, I was interested because um, and so we've been doing gaming for a long time. Uh I tend not to play online games because I'm an addict and I've had to go cold turkey a few years ago. And my all my friends are online, they're on uh board game arena and all the other places, and I just can't do it. But I gotta tell you, I use AI all the time. And sometimes I play traveler and other RPGs just as an experiment for work. I do it for work. Yeah, that's what I keep telling my wife. And I discovered that I asked the the AI to roll the dice for me because it was easier. And then I noticed that it was just kind of being nice to me, that the dice always seemed to be a little bit in my favor. So I called it out and said, Are you being nice to me with the dice? Are you randomizing it? And said, Oh, I can't randomize dice. I'm like, what have you been doing? Well, I've been doing to my best guess. I'm like, uh-huh. So I have here in front of me, because uh, for those of you right here, we can, and you'll hear it on the podcast room with the dice roll. Um, so now I keep a pair of dice in my pocket all the time, so that if I'm sitting with my iPad on my phone and I'm wanting to talk to my AI, I told it, Look, I'm rolling the dice. So when this came across my desk, when you sent this idea, I was like, Oh my gosh, yeah, I need because this doesn't lie.
SPEAKER_00:No.
SPEAKER_01:And so right now, actually, just so we know I hope my A is not listening. I lie to it occasionally. When I need to hit a sit and roll, I'll roll the dice and then I'll just make up the number. So but you've solved that problem. You have said, we're gonna allow you to roll physical dice down the tower, they land at the bottom, and then it's going to be that information is gonna be sent to the uh the um the online gaming engine. Is that right? Am I getting that right?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. So, like step by step, what's gonna happen, and this is for anybody. Okay, actually, I'm gonna take a step back, Richard. Our thought was initially for our use case for Dungeons and Dragons. And the way that people used to play is they'd be in person, they'd have a character sheet, they'd roll their dice, they'd add their modifier, and then they'd get their result. It was all in person. Sure. And then COVID has pushed so many people to going virtual for so many different things. And that's what happened to us. So we started playing virtually, and another one of my friends who happens to be my other partner on this, when he rolls virtually, I think the system knows it's him because he always rolls terribly. Absolutely terribly. And he like to give an example here, there's one time where he was able to roll a D20 three times to try and be successful. And he rolled a one, a one, and a two. And the chances that that would happen with actual dice are almost impossible. Almost impossible. But he just has this knack for digital dice do not like him and they never roll well for him. So it's been a pain point as long as we can remember. When you're playing digitally, it's a random number generator. So AI is telling you it can't even do it, even if it could, it's not the same.
SPEAKER_01:There's no such thing.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Scott, there's no such thing as a digital random number generator. There's no such thing. Yeah, it's impossible. It cannot do it. And so what it does in the olden days, the way you got a random number is it would count the number of seconds from the year January 1, 1970, in the computer uh internal clock, and it would count the number of seconds and then use that as a random number to determine in like the last two digits of whatever the number of seconds are down to like the four digits, so that it was constantly changing, but it still wasn't a hundred percent random. Now, I gotta tell you, I've played a lot of uh I like Memoir 44 from Days of Wonder. And for years I played their online game, and I and one time a game came up, and the guy said, Hey, look, the dice pattern, because it tells you at the end how your dice did, matched perfectly the percentage arc of what you should be getting. And that set me off. Yeah. And I started paying attention and I started discovering that I could manipulate my decisions based on what had already been rolled, increasing the probability that the next die roll was probably going to be this because I was following the path to the point where people started accusing me of cheating on online dice rolling. So just like your one friend had bad luck, I was starting to anticipate and be able to do good luck. So I think you're on to something really big here. So let's keep talking about the project then. So where is it at now?
SPEAKER_00:Um, so right now we have a working prototype. So we've worked with an engineer to help us design the tower in a way that is efficient. So when you're dropping the dice in the top of the tower after we've initiated a roll, about halfway down, it hits a sensor that um delays the camera to take a picture for uh a fraction of a second later. The dice will come out into the dice tray, it takes a picture, sends it up to our AI, it's uh computer learning system that's going to take that image and analyze it and determine what dice was rolled. Was it a D20 or a D6 or a D12 and what number was rolled on that dice? And we're about 99.5% accurate on those dice, as long as they're not crazy dice that have Roman numerals or dragons or right.
SPEAKER_01:Exactly.
SPEAKER_00:Eventually we'll be able to take care of those as well. But for right now, with basic dice, we're fairly accurate. And then it takes that result, sends it up to currently roll 20 is the virtual tabletop that we're working with, but we have plans to get others that we have programmed. So we have a working prototype. We've talked to some manufacturers, our engineer helped us design it in a way that we can 3D print it, but it will also work when it comes time that we have enough people that we need an injection mold so that we can lower our costs and do more for everybody. So we're we're trying to think forward in our design. And now we at least have a product that is in maybe pre-beta, is what I would say. So we're not quite beta testing. Yeah. I don't even know if alpha, so because we've talked about it, and we're like, could we call it alpha? We're close enough that maybe. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Maybe. So here's my question. And I asked you this before if it was okay for me to your funding goal for this very technical project is basically what am I looking at?$6,500? Is that what it was?
SPEAKER_00:I'm looking over here at my$6,250.
SPEAKER_01:$6,250. I looked at this, Scott, and said, there is no way they can successfully fund this project for$6,000. There's no way.
SPEAKER_00:You're so right. So when we went to Kickstarter, we actually um have talked to a few people who've been on Kickstarter. We did a bunch of research. And the way we got to our number was we looked at after all the work we've done, there are some of there's some of that that sunk cost that we eventually want to make back. But for right now, for our Kickstarter, we needed a number that we could go and achieve that would at least cover our manufacturing costs. So right now that's where we're at, is that 6,250 was our break-even point on making the towers. From there, we don't make money until we sell 300, a little over 300 towers. Isn't it that's not all of that is just catching up. Yes. Yes. So and and part of the reason that we decided that, and I talked to you actually before we launched, and we talked about doing this podcast. Um, and one of the things that we had done in our research for Kickstarter is we'd looked at the statistics because they have a statistics page that shows percentage of successful Kickstarters, how many or what did people raise in their successful Kickstarters. And there's a lot of statistics that we took into account. And we know we knew that this first time on Kickstarter, we needed a goal that was achievable so that we could have a success and then go back to Kickstarter and repeat, uh, wash and repeat as we go. But we needed it to be a number that was something that has been done before. Um, and it wasn't unfathomable, fathomable. Oh, I can't tell you.
SPEAKER_01:That works.
SPEAKER_00:That works. So for for us, that's where we landed. And we definitely need more. So we have some stretch goals and we're gonna continue to push towards those.
SPEAKER_01:Got it. So with that$6,200 or$6,250, excuse me,$6,250, that's gonna cover your manufacturing costs so that you can deliver into the hands of those people a product, right?
SPEAKER_00:100%.
SPEAKER_01:100%. So now tell me what your strategy how many people have, what's the minimum number you need to order that?
SPEAKER_00:To hit this 6,250, we needed 25 towers ordered.
SPEAKER_01:And you've got 50 backers, so that works. So you've got at least 25 towers ordered.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Um what was your yeah, you and I talked. You had sent me an email, and I have to admit now that I'm looking back at your email, that oh, because I was rather I don't know, was I blunt? I don't know.
SPEAKER_00:You were that's okay.
SPEAKER_01:But again, I thought, but I thought you were coming at it from a different angle. I didn't realize you didn't know who I was. That may that's so pretentious, what I just said.
unknown:Right?
SPEAKER_01:I thought you were asking about my Kickstarter experience and advice and background and the podcast. And no, you were just like, hey, I know this guy, I'll just gonna ask him.
SPEAKER_00:Yep.
SPEAKER_01:All right, and so uh one of the challenges I had, I think one of the key things I always say is look, you don't have a funding problem, you have a a a uh crowd problem. Yeah. Crowd. Solve for the solve for the crowd and the funding will follow. I've said that for now 15 years. Um, and so I gave you that advice. Tell me a little bit about your approach to that, solving the crowd problem.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So between my partners and I, you're by the way, when you said that, you're 100% correct. And that's something I knew, and that's why I was starting with the outreach, is we tried really hard before we went live to make sure we had enough followers of our project that even if a portion of them backed our project, that we would get there. So the way we went about that, because we're a new company, we're a no-name, nobody knows us, is we went to family, friends. As I mentioned, I went on LinkedIn and I went to people on LinkedIn that I at least had a good enough relationship with that I could go to them and say, hey, I've got this project. Let me talk to you about it. Let me know if there's anybody you know who'd be interested. So a lot of our a lot of our backers have come through our connections with outreach. We've also gone to social media influencers and tried to get them to push it. That's a harder place to break into because they have a million people reaching out to them. So a lot of it has been, I call it guerrilla marketing, because it's just us reaching out to people we know and asking for people that they know that might be interested.
SPEAKER_01:Got it. Got it. Well, I gotta tell you, and we're we're we're getting close to be out of time. One of the things that again made me excited was, as I told you at the beginning of this, was wow, I kind of like to have this just so it'd be like next to my bed. So I'd just roll my dice and then the AI would say, Oh, you rolled this. Oh, here we go. And uh um, I liked, I liked the idea. So tell me a little bit about then projects you have backed in the past. Uh, have you backed any Kickstarter projects?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I've backed a few. So the very first project I ever backed was one of Kickstarter's biggest at the time. I'm a big Brandon Sanderson fan. Sure. And he did his secret projects where he had his his novels. And I was like, I need, I need this. Like, I have to have these books. So so that was the first. And then I've probably backed about a dozen, not all of them successful, and some of them have not gone through. But that's uh it's I enjoy going on Kickstarter because people have amazing ideas.
SPEAKER_01:They do. And the Brandon Sanderson, so yes, I have all of the books, all of the secret books. Um I think I have tucked away. I'll pull up a drawer and I'll have something. So in the Brandon Sanderson world, what did you see? What where did you fall under?
SPEAKER_00:What was your what what in the Sanderson world? I'm actually currently getting my wife to listen to these books with me. Yeah. And we are uh we're in the stormlight archive because I love that series. I started with Miss Bourne. We've listened to a lot of them, but the Stormlight Archive is my my ghost.
SPEAKER_01:And that's what I'm asking. In the Stormlight archives, with all of the different, what are they called, the different um categories, characteristics, which one do you find you and your wife belonging to?
SPEAKER_00:Ooh, that's I don't know. I don't know is the answer. I I guess I have not.
SPEAKER_01:I think it asked you when you did the play, when you did the Kickstarter, it asked you.
SPEAKER_00:It's it may have, but it's been a few years, and so I can't remember what I came to. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:All right. My daughter always I'm at I saw myself as an edge dancer. And if you remember, that's the short story that he wrote.
SPEAKER_00:Right? Yeah, I love edge dancers. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Where she constantly was uh, what was her name? I forgot now. Uh, but where she could slide, make herself slippery, and just yeah, she was awesome.
SPEAKER_00:She would explain, I'm awesome. Oh, that person's more awesome than I am. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:That's kind of yeah, she awesomeness. Yeah, that's I was like, Yeah, that sounds like me. Okay. So my wife's like, please don't say that. Yeah, all right, Scott. I'm excited for your project. I'm excited to see it succeed. I'm excited to see uh see where it goes. Um this is interesting because you started a company, has nothing to do with your regular job. Nope, nothing at all. Nothing at all. I mean, we haven't even mentioned it, but it has something to do with legal and other things, and it's way out there. So I want to say I'm excited to see what your success and I like your plan. The plan is put it out there, get some followers, get some backers, get a prototype, get a minimum product out there, get people talking, and then turn around and see if you can get those people excited for uh for the next iteration of it. So what do you what do you think of? What's what's the future look like?
SPEAKER_00:Future for us is now that we're we've we're backed, right? Like is to continue to drive towards some stretch goals. And what those stretch goals will do for us is it'll expand um the application that we have to be more capable. It'll expand the virtual tabletops we're working with to be more capable. And then eventually, we would like to have different forms that it's delivered in. And then from there, we've and these are all pipe dreams for right now. Um we want to do more that takes what you're doing physically and translates it into the virtual world so that anybody who's like us who has any game that they like to play in person, but lives far away from those friends that you grew up playing it with, you can do it without without losing the tactile feel and and that I don't know, that je ne sais quoi of playing in person.
SPEAKER_01:Right. That one thing that brings it different, that feel of the dice, you know. I love uh I sit here and spin my dice on the edge and it's it right in just all of those years. And my wife's like, how can you do math so fast? I'm like, because I've been rolling dice for my whole life, and you gotta add those, right?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:So, Scott, this has been awesome. And uh, we're gonna wrap up here. I'm gonna how would people find it? The project's called Order of the Dice Vision Dice Tower. That's the name of the project on Kickstarter. Where else can they find more information about this?
SPEAKER_00:So if you can you can go to our website, orderofhedice.com, and from there, there should be a landing page that says follow us on Kickstarter. There's a video on our YouTube, which if you search Order of the Dice on YouTube, you should be able to find our YouTube that has a video that explains it. I just announced on our update on Friday when we hit our number that we're working on a professional commercial. So hopefully that'll come out soon because right now the video is something that we did ourselves that at least gets the idea out there. So those would be the places to check us out.
SPEAKER_01:Excellent. You've been listening to Funding the Dream, my guess has been Scott Strong, and we've been talking about the order of the dice vision dice tower. That's a whole lot of words there. It is. It is uh the idea of taking real dice that you roll and then having them magically transported into the virtual world so that people know you're not cheating. And so, oh sorry, I don't think that's that might be part of it. Hopefully, you found something inspiring uh chat listening to the chat with Scott and I. I know I have. I'm very excited about this project. So be sure to go check it out. Go find Order of the Dice. And I want to say thank you for listening. It's always a pleasure to have you here join us. And uh, until next time, take care.