Level Up Dice Reviews

Manipulative, predatory CEO. Falsified product values. Falsified employee wages and benefits. Skewed ethics as a company.

The CEO, Alex, is manipulative and verbally abusive and resorts to gaslighting employees over finding actionable solutions to arising conflicts. He, unfortunately, does not use any project management tools despite asking for their implementation, Monday.com, and continuously drops interest in managing projects he's taken responsibility of the minute he's grown bored of it or it becomes frustrating. Along this note, the biggest example is Dice Conjurer, a partner project that was presented to Alex at GenCon 2022. Despite inquiring about the status of that partnership after it, the partnership ran two circuits of conventions and well over 6 months of design and advertising, Alex refused to say why he went cold turkey with the client. The website is still up for this partner and yet I don't even think he has spoken to that partnership's CEO since end of 2022. Some concerning items of point: the company has been operating in the red since 2021, and as of March 2024, the CEO downsized the company to 4 people in an attempt to not list for insolvency in Australia (this is a company based in AUS with a warehouse in Indiana). The staff are overworked and there is no room for growth in the company, which means the employee turnover is horrendous. What is more concerning is the CEO has said out loud he looks for people he can take advantage of and better manipulate to get more out of them and will at any point try and bring the attention back to him and his woes if you personally bring up any conflicts or issues. He has fake cried before and left video calls without notice with clients on the call. The dice-making industry has become an over-saturated market now, so the CEO is trying to run a "we design everything" mentality business without a proper understanding of what that takes to operate and be successful with only one industrial designer. The CEO has burned a lot of bridges in the community as well as professional contacts. From underselling market value handmade dice makers pieces, to blaming the community instead of taking personal responsibility of his own actions and then trying to retract his statements on the company social media accounts. Examples of this are best seen in the concerning tank dice issue where a WWII tank panel was CNC into sets of dice and the community's outcry for why that was wrong to do was dismissed and he refused to allow the community manager at the time to handle the situation. He instead posted videos and Twitter comments progressing the bad situation. Other examples where he did not allow leadership to do their job and or didn't consult the COO was the purchase of Kingsfell while they had an active Kickstarter going. This killed the Kickstarter and he still hasn't fulfilled any physical orders from that because he cannot use the equipment without licensing, a facility that can run the equipment, and a person who knows how to make the product running the machines. He has thrown the COO under the bus while they were on vacation across the country in a Kingsfell Kickstarter update where he signed the update as the COO. That employee then received hate mail across all of their socials causing undue stress. The CEO tried adjusting PTO on the backend reducing the accrued hours and it took the COO to have it reversed. The CEO on multiple occasions, and without permission or agreement from any staff, illegally adjusted paychecks of salary workers because he could not afford to pay them multiple months in a row. There were employees on the brink of homelessness because he would wait 3 weeks to pay out the other half of the check. The AUS government has knocked on his door, so to speak, twice now due to the amount of Labor and Industry claims filed against this company.