Mushrooms, Pandas and Penguins: The Novelty Inclusion Series

There is a moment we watch happen at every trade fair. A buyer walks the aisle past rows of perfectly serious dice — gunmetal, obsidian-dark, dragon-embossed — then stops dead in front of a transparent D20 with a tiny panda sitting inside it. They pick it up, turn it to the light, and laugh. That laugh is the product. Novelty inclusion dice — clear resin shells with a miniature character suspended in the middle — have grown from a side experiment in our pouring room into one of the most requested lines we make. This is the story of the series: what it is, why it sells, how a panda actually gets inside a die, and the real minimums and timelines if you want a character of your own.

What an inclusion die actually is

An inclusion die is a transparent or lightly tinted resin die with a solid object embedded inside it during the pour — a cast miniature, a sculpted mushroom, a foil, a dried flower. The object is fixed in place permanently: unlike a liquid core, where a sealed capsule of fluid moves as the die turns, an inclusion is frozen mid-scene, like an insect in amber that happens to be wearing a friendly expression.

That distinction matters for manufacturing. A liquid core lives or dies on its seal; an inclusion lives or dies on placement. The figure has to sit centred in the die's volume so the numbers stay legible on every face, the silhouette reads from every angle, and the finished die still rolls without an obvious bias toward one side. Get the placement wrong by a millimetre and the panda's ear pokes through the 17 face — charming in exactly zero retail contexts.

Why tiny animals outsell dragons

Serious fantasy iconography sells to people who already play tabletop games. A penguin in a D20 sells to everyone else. That is the commercial logic of the whole novelty series, and it shows up in three ways.

First, the gift market. A significant share of inclusion dice never touch a character sheet. They are bought as desk objects, stocking gifts and "thinking of you" purchases by people who could not tell a D12 from a D20. A cute animal removes the knowledge barrier: nobody needs the rules of any game to want the panda.

Second, the feed. Inclusion dice photograph like miniature dioramas. A macro shot of a mushroom forest inside a sharp-edge D20 is content, not just catalogue — and shops tell us these are the listings that get shared rather than merely browsed.

Third, repeat behaviour. Novelty characters are collectable by design. A buyer who takes the penguin comes back to ask what else lives in the series, which is one reason repeat business matters so much in this category — across all YSDICE lines, 26% of our customers reorder, and novelty sets are a reliable contributor. It is also why we run two doors: wholesale and custom projects through our Alibaba storefront, and single retail sets through maywinflow.com, so a shop can test a character at retail before committing to a wholesale carton.

Meet the menagerie

The series is less a fixed catalogue than a growing cast. The panda came first and remains the gateway die. The penguin followed — upright, slightly indignant, best in an ice-blue tint that makes the shell read as Antarctic water. The bull leans the other way: heavier silhouette, warmer shell, popular as a zodiac and new-year gift piece. The kaiju is the collector's favourite — a tiny city-stomping monster that turns a D20 into a disaster movie you can roll initiative with.

Around the animals sit the object inclusions: mushroom clusters that turn a die into a forest-floor terrarium, potion bottles and alchemy vials poured into sharp-edge shells, and ghost figures floating in smoke-tinted resin for the spooky-season drops that now reliably sell out every autumn.

Nobody needs a panda in a D20. That is exactly why they buy it — the serious sets are a decision, the panda is a reflex.— what we tell buyers planning their first novelty run

How a panda gets inside a D20

The figure comes first. Each character is cast separately as a miniature — small enough to leave clear resin between itself and every face, detailed enough to survive being viewed through curved material that magnifies some angles and compresses others. Thin, spindly details are the enemy here; we will come back to that.

The die itself is then built in layers. A first pour fills part of the mold and is allowed to reach a gel state — firm enough to hold weight, tacky enough to bond chemically with the next layer. The figure is placed onto that gel bed with tweezers, checked against the mold's number orientation, and the second pour closes the die over it. Rushing this window is the classic failure: pour too early and the figure sinks or drifts off-centre; too late and a visible seam line ghosts across the die where the two layers met.

Air is the other enemy. Every crevice of a sculpted figure wants to trap a bubble, so the resin is degassed and the pour is worked so bubbles rise and clear before the gel sets. On our sharp-edge inclusion dice the cured blanks are then hand-sanded through five grits until the flat faces turn optically clear — each face becomes a little window onto the scene inside. Numerals are hand-filled with baked enamel, Pantone-matched to the colour spec, so a mint-shell mushroom die can carry exactly the cream numbers the brand asked for, run after run.

Sharp shell or rounded shell?

Every inclusion character can live in either of our two resin lines, and the choice changes the product more than most buyers expect. A sharp-edge shell is hand-poured epoxy with razor-flat faces: it displays the figure like a specimen case and photographs with museum clarity, which is why the potion-bottle and elixir designs almost always ship sharp. A rounded shell is the classic tumbling die: the curved faces lens the figure softly, it feels friendlier in the hand, and it suits the gift buyer who will actually roll it nightly.

Neither answer is wrong; they are simply different products wearing the same character. Several of our clients run both — sharp for the collector edition, rounded for the evergreen retail single — from the same inclusion figure.

Real MOQs, molds and timelines

Novelty dice have a reputation for being a big-brand game, but the entry point is lower than most shops assume. Our existing characters — panda, penguin, kaiju, mushroom and the rest — are factory stock designs, and in-stock sharp-edge and rounded sets start at just 5 sets. You can also mix materials and designs freely in any combination totalling $500 or more, which is how most retailers build their first novelty assortment: a few pandas, a few penguins, a spooky set for autumn, and see what moves.

One step up, light customisation — your shell colours, your Pantone-matched numeral colour and your logo laser-engraved on our stock molds — starts at 10 sets with no tooling fee. That is enough to give a game café or a small brand its own colourway of an existing character without touching mold budgets.

A fully original character of your own is a proper custom project: from 100 sets, with a one-time steel mold at $600–$2,000 depending on complexity — and that mold cost is refunded back to you as your reorder volume accumulates, so a character that succeeds effectively pays off its own tooling.

Designing a character that casts well

Not every cute drawing becomes a good inclusion, and this is where a factory earns its keep at the design stage. The characters that work share three traits. A readable silhouette: at roughly the size of a fingernail, viewed through curved resin, the outline does the storytelling — a panda reads instantly, an intricate character with a sword and a cape becomes visual noise. Chunky forms: solid volumes cast cleanly and release from molds reliably; thin limbs, whiskers and tiny accessories trap bubbles and snap. Colour contrast: the figure needs to separate from the shell tint — a white-and-black panda in clear resin, an orange kaiju in smoke grey. We flag all of this at the free 3D design stage, so problems die on screen instead of in resin.

Think in series from day one. One character in three seasonal colourways outperforms three unrelated characters, because it gives buyers a reason to return. And because we archive every mold, the reorder you place a year later colour-matches the original run — the spring-green mushroom die your customers loved is the same green next spring.

Packaging, safety and the gift counter

Because so many inclusion dice are bought as gifts by people outside the hobby, the box matters more here than anywhere else in our catalogue. A serious gunmetal set can ship in a plain tuck box and nobody blinks; a panda D20 bought for a niece's birthday needs to arrive looking like a present. The options we produce in-house run from windowed kraft boxes that show the character without opening, through velvet pouches for single-die gifting, up to magnetic-lid gift boxes with foam cradles that hold each die of a seven-piece set facing the same way — figure forward, number up. Retailers consistently tell us the windowed formats earn their extra cents many times over at the counter, because the die sells itself the same way it does at a trade fair: on sight.

The gift market also brings safety paperwork that pure hobby channels rarely ask about. The moment a product looks like a toy — and a penguin in a die absolutely does — European and North American retailers may ask for EN71 or ASTM F963 test reports, and some marketplaces require them before listing. Every batch poured under our roof can be sent for third-party toy-safety testing on request, and we recommend budgeting for it on any animal character headed to gift retail. It is a routine cost when planned at order time and an expensive scramble when a distributor asks for the certificate after the goods have landed. Worth knowing too: an inclusion die is a solid object all the way through — no liquid, no moving parts, nothing to leak — which makes the compliance conversation considerably simpler than it is for liquid-core designs.

Everything above happens in one building. YSDICE — also known as Dongguan Yushun Hardware Co., Ltd., a registered factory in Chang'an, Dongguan, and pouring, sanding, numeral filling and gift packing all sit within walking distance of the same QC bench — so the box, the paperwork and the die inside it are checked by the same team before the carton is sealed.

A worked example: a shop's first novelty order

Numbers make the ladder concrete, so here is a lightly disguised version of an order we see monthly. A friendly-local-game-store owner wants to test novelty dice without betting real money. Round one: an assortment built from in-stock characters — five panda D20s, five penguin sets, five mushroom sharp-edge sets and five ghost sets for the autumn shelf — comfortably clearing the $500 mixed-order threshold, shipped express and on the shelf inside two weeks. The store learns something no catalogue could tell them: their customers laugh at the kaiju but buy the mushrooms.

Round two follows six weeks later: 10 light-custom mushroom sets in the shop's own forest-green shell with its tree logo laser-engraved on the high face, no tooling fee, production inside a month. The shop now has an exclusive nobody else in town carries, for roughly the cost of a single distributor case of a mainstream board game. Round three is where the ladder pays off: the store commissions its own character — a tiny sculpted acorn sprite tied to its brand — at the 100-set custom minimum, with the steel mold at $600–$2,000 refunding back as reorders accumulate. Total elapsed time from first cautious carton to a proprietary product: about five months. The pattern repeats so reliably that we now quote all three rounds up front when a retailer asks YSDICE for a first novelty quote, because seeing the whole staircase makes the first step easier to take.

Mistakes that sink inclusion projects

Most failed inclusion projects fail on screen, which is the cheap place to fail — but a few classic mistakes make it further than they should. The ones we intercept most often:

None of these are exotic knowledge — they are simply what accumulates after enough pours. It is also why the free 3D proof exists: the design team at Dongguan Yushun Hardware Co., Ltd. would rather argue about a whisker in software than remake a mold in steel.

From sketch to the table

The novelty inclusion series exists because dice are allowed to be joyful, and the buyers who understood that earliest have built some of the most loyal small brands we supply. The manufacturing behind the joke is entirely serious — centred placement, bubble-free pours, five-grit sanding, Pantone-matched numerals and inspected cartons — but the product itself just has to make someone laugh in an aisle.

If you have a character in mind — an animal, a mascot, a mushroom that means something to your community — send it over, even as a rough sketch. Queenie, our English-speaking project manager, will come back within 3 days with a free 3D design of every face, a unit price and an honest timeline. Samples ship express in 3–7 days, and full runs can go DDP door-to-door so the first surprise your customers get is the panda, not the customs invoice.

Written by Queenie Founder & English-speaking project manager · Dongguan Yushun Hardware Co., Ltd. (YSDICE)

Queenie has cast, poured and shipped custom dice from Chang'an, Dongguan since 2018 — and still answers every project inquiry herself. Questions about your run? Write to queenie@ysdice.com or message us on WhatsApp.