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Mach Dice
for:Apple iPhone and Touch
Price:$0.99
The Apple iPhone has revolutionized the cell phone market and the new app store on the iPhone is revolutionizing the functions on the iPhone. There are plenty of crappy apps on the application but for every 50 crappy ones a gem does shine through, one of these gems is Mach Dice. Mach Dice is a dice rolling app plain and simple. Now you may be saying to your self, there are a bunch of dice rolling apps on the iPhone what makes this one special? The quick and dirty answer is its dead simple and beautiful.
Mach Dice has a simple wood colored background and two buttons on the top and bottom. The bottom button rolls the dice for you. The top button shows the dice you are rolling currently. If you push the button a numerical pad comes up that you input the dice you would like to roll. Any dice rolling nerd or D&D player should pick up on the format you first type how many dice you will roll then press "d" for the type of dice so 2 six sided dice would be 2d6. You can also roll multiple types of dice at once (see pic above) buy pressing the plus symbol. Pick your dice and your ready to roll.
So it all sounds pretty standard fare so far right? Well this is where it gets interesting. Mach Dice lets you use the accelerometer on the iPhone to roll the dice. You shake the phone and the dice themselves will bounce and roll on the screen. This makes it feel just like you are rolling dice. One thing I do like about it is that it is not to sensitive so you won't accidentally roll dice when showing your roll to other people, you really do have to shake it to get it to work. Of course you can always press the roll button on the screen to roll the dice instead of actually shaking the phone but I find the shaking the phone the fun part.
So what is not to like? Well for starters you are unable to roll anything over a d20 with the dice. It will still generate a number on the bottom of the screen but the dice will just show ? marks on it. The second is you wont be able to roll a certain amount and drop the lowest type scoring. You can always just look on the screen and drop the lowest and add it in your head but it kinda defeats the purpose of the app in some ways. There also is no choice to choose colors for the dice. I would love to have different colors to roll for games like Risk and other war games to compare the two different colors to determine attacks. These are things that I hope will be addressed in the future but still a very solid app.
This is a great app and I believe anyone that owns an iPhone and is reading the Geek should pick this up. It is cheap, beautiful, and simple to use. At $0.99 it is cheaper than actually buying a set of dice. I have been using this in almost every game I play. I play mostly Euros so dice don't come up often but this really does the trick if you need dice. Heck just for a roll to see who goes first it is worth the price of admission.
Pros:
Beautiful
Intuitive and simple
Access to hundreds of dice in one app
cheap
Fun shake to roll feature
Cons
No image shows for dice over d20s, sorry d100 rollers :(
No roll certain amount of dice and drop the lowest
No Color coding of dice (always white)
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