Dice Mysteries by Steve Drury

1 review for Dice Mysteries by Steve Drury

1. Rated 5 out of 5

   Andy Martin – September 14, 2019

   If you love dice effects – and who doesn’t – you will love Steve Drury’s new book 🙂 It is a wonderful treasure trove of ideas, history and effects and at 582 pages it is huge! It is very detailed and thorough and is jam packed with useful information with almost everything to do with dice and taps into related areas such as runes and even mentions Brian Watson’s Sim Stones.  I was immediately able to finally identify some dice that I had long forgotten about here. 

   This book is not really aimed at the casual performer but if you want to take your dice effects to the next level there is so much in here to find and use.

   • The first part of the book is all about history, etymology, cultural and scientific impacts of Dice and their alternatives – any number of nuggets can be used to amp up your patter and bizarrist stories. 
   • Then next part of book is concerned with using dice for divination with sections from Les Cross, Richard Webster and Stephen Ball.
   • The next section gets into gambling with dice pretty seriously and Steve includes a very interesting reproduction of H.C. Evans Secret Blue Book (1932) which is a wonderful catalogue detailing all manner of gaffed dice and gambling devices which I found very interesting.
   • Then various other types of dice and dice boxes are discussed including: Anverdi’s Mental Die, Magic Wagon’s Crystal Mental Die, Richard Gerlitz’s Oriental Die Box, and the Sure-Shot Dice box, to name just a few.
   • In the final sections he details over twenty full-blown routines with dice from an impressive line-up of guest contributors to please every palette.

   There is pretty much something for everyone here, and I found it very useful indeed in researching my History Project – in fact I wish I’d read it sooner.  If you want to know anything about dice you’ll probably find it in this wonderful book.  Great job Steve!