I don't blink an eye at all the Bluetooth-connected products I've accumulated, including a coffee mug that regulates temperature, but even for me, the GoDice are a bridge too far. The idea here is that connected dice are a way to blend the best of the digital and physical worlds. Roll all of the dice on the table and the numbers show up in the on-screen game. It's an interesting theory, but in practice, the set of dice are too expensive and don't perform as expected each and every time.

With the GoDice full pack set, you get six dice, a carrying case, a magnetic charger, a drawstring pouch and a table stand. The handful of dice and its few accessories retail for $119.95—an amount worthy of a double take.

The technology enthusiast in me is thoroughly impressed by the engineering involved in creating the GoDice. Unfortunately, the price is too high and the performance was fallible. So even with my most optimistic outlook, the product simply isn't a good value for anyone.

From a technical standpoint, I was curious about how the set of GoDice functioned. How complicated would they be to use? Would charging them be an inconvenience?

The GoDice arrived in a clear plastic tube that was magnetically attached to the charger. You need to insert two AA batteries into the charger for power. There are no cables or ports here. The clear holder twists to let the dice slide out. Then each one needs to be pressed onto the charger, individually, to power up.

The side of each dice with the five pips, or spots, is the charging conduit. The indent in each pip is a contact point for the charger. Utilizing this side of the dice is a clever solution because each pip will align correctly, no matter how it's placed onto the three diagonal pins. Even more fascinating is that each dice only needs to be held on the charger for 10 seconds to get its full charge. Once that happens, its battery should be good for about 2 hours of gameplay. That duration was a mostly realistic figure, if not a little optimistic.

Each dice also has an RGB light inside so it can illuminate for identification or other uses. While the actual technical details or the guts of each dice aren't overly complicated, they are pretty ingenious in how they all come together.

The big caveat in looking at how the dice work is that they didn't always work for me. I played several games of Yatzy right out of the gate, and regularly the dice on screen showed different numbers than the dice rolled on the table. The first couple of times this happened, my daughter and I would take a side, rotate it one way and then return it to the number that had been rolled, and this worked to correct the problem. It also became old after it continued to happen.

We followed the directions and shook the dice a few times in our hands before rolling them. That did not seem to help the overall problem. The dice use Bluetooth 5.0, which should provide continued connection, but occasionally I would see an error message that a dice was unable to be found when it rolled more than 3 to 4 feet away from my phone. Eventually, after repeat instances, the GoDice's unreliability became too burdensome to be enjoyable.

It seems that I'm not alone in experiencing reliability issues, either. The App Store reviews, spanning months, reiterate all these same kinds of glitches. One silver lining is that it does look like software updates are happening, so these problems could be fixed in the future.

The app is available for Android and iOS, though it is optimized to be used on a tablet. The font and buttons are small on a phone and some are even cut off and flow out of the viewable display.

In the gallery of games are ones like Yatzy, Farkle, backgammon and GoRPG, which is a calculator for RPG adventure games. There were about 13 games or utilities available when I was testing the GoDice—more than half of which I didn't recognize.

There was a tiny learning curve with the game designs. For example, my first time playing Yatzy and Farkle, I didn't press the correct buttons, and my score wasn't saved from one turn to the next. Once I got the hang of the specifics, the game designs were fine to use. Additionally, it does look like new games or software are being added to the GoDice mobile app.

I tried to make every effort possible to consider circumstances that were beyond my normal mindset, such as the possibility that connected dice like these ones could provide accessibility for people with certain disabilities. Even that scenario, however, seemed limited due to GoDice's reliance on its app, with only a small selection of games and utilities. Maybe there are some niche situations that could really benefit from these pricey dice, but I couldn't think of them.

The value of the GoDice set is simply out of sorts. If the set were under $50, the GoDice might be a more compelling novelty that encouraged regular game nights. But for over $100, and especially with the unreliable performance I experienced, I'm not sure that this is a product that anyone should dive into.

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