The 4 Best Story Dice Apps to Make Your Creativity Soar
Did you know December 4th was Dice Day?
I was tickled pink when I saw that in my ‘Bizarre Holidays’ calendar. I really can’t express how much I love these random bits of randomness we make up for ourselves. 🙂
I used to love dice when I was a kid. We used to play a lot of backgammon for a while, and it was somehow fascinating to me that such tiny things could hold such power. Plus, the fact that the dice were so tiny automatically made them cool beyond cool in my young book.
Of course, few are the games in this world that you can play without wanting to win. Backgammon was no exception, and truth be told I was no exception. So it wasn’t long before I started doing what basically every naive kid would start doing – I started experimenting with throwing techniques and hand positioning, and every other bit of silliness you can imagine.
That’s kind of the seed of how every budding superstition starts, though, isn’t it? You convince yourself that success rests in just doing this one thing ‘the right way’ and influencing whatever energy guides random chance and our day to day.
Fast forward to the present, and I don’t think I’ve touched a real die in forever. By which I mean, at the very least since I was 15. Life gets more intense after middle school, doesn’t it; not as much leisure time as in the before, and suddenly newer hobbies, if you can even squeeze them in, seem oh so much more important. So no more real-life dice for me.
Virtual dice, however, are another matter.
I am… Let’s not use the word ‘addicted.’ I am an enthusiast of creativity tools. I have a bajillion of them – to use the technical term – and although I don’t actually use them as much as I should, or as often as I should, or as consistently as I should, I wouldn’t even hear of uninstalling any one of them.
With Dice Day upon us, and on the 4th as it happens, I thought it would be a great idea to show you 4 apps from one of my favourite classes of creativity tools: the Story Dice.
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Story Dice at a Glance
…At a barely there, very abbreviated, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it kind of glance, even, because the name is pretty self-explanatory.
Story Dice are more or less complex sets of dice, where each die bears pictograms on all its faces. The pictograms can be completely random, or they can be grouped into specific, themed sets, depending on their overall purpose.
The idea behind story dice, as you can guess, is to give your creativity the smack of life. You look at the pretty (or at least hopefully pretty!) pictures, you free-associate if you need to, and if you feel the spark of an idea – perhaps even of a story – come to life, you write. You don’t get all self-conscious, you don’t censor or filter yourself of waste time wondering if it’s a good idea. You just. Write.
If you’ve written something other than a story, or if you’ve created something that’s not a piece of writing, you may want to share it.
If you’ve written a story, you may NOT want to share it. You may have just cringed in visceral reaction at the idea that you’d share.
Because it would be flawed.
Because it would be incomplete.
Because sharing feels like a risk at the best of times.
Or maybe you’d come to feel that the act of it would give your readers a glimpse into a facet of you, raw and unfinished, that they might love to see.
Maybe you’d want to see whether it might also help to kind of muffle the voice of that often-cutting inner critic, just knowing that you put something so brave and different out there, something that you can’t see as a thing but just as a misshapen collection of flaws MacGyvered together with a bit of mental rubber band.
However, the sharing isn’t actually the point.
The point is in the creative exercice itself. It’s in the idea that you’re allowing yourself to have and to develop, to tease out and to grow in one and the same sitting.
It’s in breaking the shackles of what you keep thinking your writing should be, and instead trying to make it into a process you simply enjoy. Like that. In and of itself. Just for the sake of it.
Can you imagine the freedom of it already?
4 Story Dice Apps for the 4th
Before we start going over these apps, great news! Unlike in my previous post, where I was constrained to limit myself to iOS only, these apps exist in nearly identical form on both the Android and iOS platforms. Most of them are either free or super cheap to install, and the hours and oodles of fun you can have with them make them priceless.
As ever with me, these are DEFINITELY not in order of best-to-worst, and they’re also not necessarily listed in order of preference. It’s most likely they’re being ranked by where they happened to fall in the “Creativity” folder on my phone as I glance at it while I’m writing.
And, just for a lark, I’m going to give you the key takeaway before I even dive into the main event.
STORY DICE WORK WITH ANYTHING.
You can use them to get story ideas, blog post ideas, arts & crafts ideas, photography ideas, all kinds of things that require composition.
You can use them yourself, or take them to put together a challenge for any writing or creativity group you may be part of. Not even your imagination is the limit – take the Story Dice as literally as you want, you’ll still make something great!
Story Dice by Zuidsoft
Yep, here there be cuteness, and an unabashed lot of it.
Behind the cute cartoony surface of these dice you’ll find four categories of topics:
- general
- kids
- mystery
- star wars.
You can mix and match between the four to your heart’s content, as long as you stick to the maximum of 10 dice that the app allots to you. There are sliders in each category that enable you to very smoothly select exactly how many dice you want to play with out of each, with no other constraints as long as you don’t try to go over that sum total of 10.
The categories themselves cover a whole host of creative needs, as you can tell by how divergent those topics are, and you can get incredibly fun combinations whether you stick to one category or mix them up.
The app does let you touch the screen and move the dice around. That’s handy if the dice you drew give you some form of an idea and you want to line them up accordingly, or if your dice landed on top of each-other as you rolled them and you want to actually see them all.
If you want to roll again, you can
- go into the hamburger menu (the dice selection menu) – even if you don’t make any changes to the dice categories you’ve selected, the dice will still shift.
- press that Scarlet Witch-looking symbol in the middle, it’s going to automatically shuffle your screen for you.
- shake your phone like it’s offended you.
If you want to save a particular screen for later, there are no export options. You need to screencap that thing yourself.
Remember,
- push the home button + power button together on the iPhone,
- press and hold the volume down button + power button together on Android phones.
If the idea of 10 pictograms at once seems vaguely intimidating, don’t worry. True, you don’t have to use all of them if you don’t want to, but even better. The app actually comes up with crazy combinations even if you limit yourself to two dice and just play around with one or two categories at a time.
StoryCubes by Asmodee Digital
Ah, the granddaddy of story dice apps.
StoryCubes is, bar none, the richest of the apps on this list. It’s made up of a mindblowing 15 dice categories. They’re available to you in the form of IAP, for the most part, and while some of them do contain the standard 9 dice, others (as you’ll imagine, the cheapest) only contain 3.
It almost goes without saying, of course, but you could stick to the basic cubes that you get when you first download the app, and you still wouldn’t run out of ways to use it any time soon.
You can pick between a minimum of 1 and a maximum of 9 dice to play – excuse me, I mean, to get serious and creative with. (Picking one die gets a bit hilarious when you try to re-roll: 3 times out of 4, the die will launch upwards with a spin, spin some more as it lands, and invariably you’ll get the same side that you started from.)
So, if the amount of choice you had in the previous app was intimidating, what’s the word for this one?
(Well, of course the word is awesome, but aside from that.)
I think I’ll go with limitless.
I was gonna start putting together numbers and totals and all that other jazz, but you know what? Let’s not do math today.
Suffice it to say you could randomise the app over and over every day and still not run out of things to do a year later.
Where functionality is concerned, the app enables you to
- lock the screen so the dice can’t be shifted from their current combination,
- take a snapshot of the board from inside the app,
- turn all the dice on your board right side up,
- kill the sound without muting your phone.
To get a new dice combo, you just shake your phone. Fiddling with the dice sets will not change the dice that are already on your board so long as you don’t deactivate that category.
…And because it’s actually more than a little daunting to begin to describe what you could do with this app, I’ll leave it entirely up to your imagination.
StoryCubes costs 1.99 to download, with an IAP for each additional cube pack. The total in-app cost to buy a complete set will, frankly, probably run you less than one physical set of StoryCubes. Get the app HERE on Android, and HERE on iOS.
Story Dice by Thinkamingo
KISS is the name of this Story Dice’s game. As in, Keep It Simple, Silly. (Yeah, I know, nobody says it like that.)
What do we have here? We have a cute, plain interface, we have some nice and minimalist pictographs, and we have, drumroll please, no more dice categories.
So long, intimidation, right? Well, don’t let the plain face and lack of animation fool you. These are some zany little dice.
Just like in the previous apps, you can play with as little as 1 or as many as 10 story dice. The added fun is in how the app picks them for you.
Here’s what the previous two apps do when you select 1. They literally put one 3D model of a die on your board, and then the app physically rolls that one die over and over until you exhaust its 9 sides. It can be over soon – or not, if you get the same side 20 times in a row or whatever – and the sides of the die will be very similar in tone.
Tap-tap-tapping your way down to 1 die in Thinkamingo’s Story Dice, on the other hand, is a whole other kind of beautiful beginning.
Look at that! It randomly gives me one side, any side, from all of the story dice within the app. Isn’t that just delicious?
I’m zinging with ideas just thinking about the round robin type stories you could tell with it. Imagine the absurd heights you’d get to if you let one chapter, one paragraph, even one sentence at a time be shaped by the roll of that one individual die.
It would be like being a kid again. Nothing needs to make sense anymore, you can just tell the story that goes with the flow of that random roll.
On to more practical matters.
There are no screen export options, so you again have to take a screenshot with your phone if you want to save a particular dice combination for later.
Shaking your phone will not roll your dice, and neither will going into the options screen, as long as you don’t change the number of dice you want to work with.
However, touching your screen absolutely will re-roll everything, so don’t be tempted to try and right the dice or line them up OCD-like.
Story Dice costs 1.99 to download. Get it HERE on Android, and HERE on iOS.
Story Lines by Magostech
Oh, I am almost having second thoughts about including this one.
It’s not that I think the app in itself is unworthy. It’s cute, it looks the same on iOS and Android, it marches to the beat of its own drum in terms of looks, feel, and functionality…
But the ads. My god, the ads. The most egregious form of in-app ads: unskippable videos.
I don’t know. Maybe it’s just me. But the fact that they essentially lock me out of my phone (for 5 seconds, Allie, damn! – I know. Still creepy.) really, really, really, really rubs me the wrong way.
Is that simply the price to pay for an otherwise free app? You’ll be the judge.
So. Story Lines.
We have another in with the KISSers. Meaning, here too we’re only rolling one set of dice. 9 of them, because the classics must be respected. Simpler still, there’s no altering the number of dice you roll. You go full set or you go bust.
Buuuut, wait a minute. Maybe not so simple.
Is that 10-sided dice you see?
YEEES.
The dice seem to span objects, activities, pets, pastimes, travel destinations… Just about everything you’d need to craft a nice, gripping three-dimensional tale that would be worth your readers’ time.
There is no option to export a screenshot, so you’ll again have to screengrab yourself if you want to save a particular dice combination for later.
There are actually no real settings or options to speak of, other than the one to lock your tabletop, which will freeze the dice in place.
If you want to line your dice up differently, you can move them with your fingers. If you want to roll again, you’ve already guessed that you need to shake you phone. I love that the move is almost instinctive; don’t you think so?
Story Lines is free to download. Get it HERE on Android (it disappeared from the Google Play store as I was typing this post, so you have to not mind Amazon) and HERE on iOS.
All 4 apps work offline, even when you’re in airplane mode. They’re all fun, they’re all unique, and they all differ from each-other just enough that I have no qualms about them eating up the storage space it takes to keep them all installed.
Happy Dice Day! Happy creating!
