Pages

Friday, March 15, 2013

That's how we roll

My gaming group has a thing for dice towers, it turns out.

Mike started it with his dice tower, made by VixenTor.



His is the one on the right. VixenTor isn't around any more, sadly, because all of their production equipment and supplies were destroyed in a house fire.

The other tower pictured above is actually Karl's, and he sometimes loans it to Echo, but he doesn't use it any more. Instead, he's got a dice tower he got form a thrift store in a copy of a board game called Chute-5.


It includes a tiltable panel at the bottom so you can make the dice fall either of the two trays, as you choose.


This seems almost useless, but I'm sure it was very important somehow to the game.

Jessica and I decided to make our own towers out of Lego. Here's hers.



She included a reroll-chit holder on the front. Because it's so annoying to lose track of your chit.

Jessica used plates to make side-to-side baffles in her tower. I opted for 2x3 low slopes to make front-to-back baffles, and a more open tower structure.



I also have an optional extension I can add on top, for when I need extra randomness.


At over 26 inches tall, it is easily the mightiest dice tower in the game.


You might think this is going a bit too far, but if you could see how random the numbers I get with this baby are, you'd have to admit it's worth it.

Joe, because he suffers from the delusion that K'Nex is in any way comparable to Lego, decided to make this cheap knock-off.


Yes, that's a dice basket at the top with a chain-driven axle that tilts the dice into the tower. Pathetic, isn't it? And it works about as well as you'd expect, which is to say not at all. I see this as an open admission from Joe that K'Nex are simply inferior to Lego in every respect, and this is a misguided attempt to cover that up by adding unnecessary bells and whistles to what is already a rather ugly design.

Fortunately, Joe came to his senses, and now he uses a dice tower that also comes from a thrifted board game, The Inventors.



And it actually has a bell on it. You stack the dice in the hopper on the right, push the punger next to it, and the dice ring the bell as they fall through.

And no discussion of dice towers and Lego would be complete without a tip of the hat to whoever came up with this brilliant thing here.

Edit: embedding the video failed, so I must link to it in a clumsy fashion instead. Thanks, Blogger.



3 comments:

  1. "You might think this is going a bit too far, but if you could see how random the numbers I get with this baby are, you'd have to admit it's worth it."

    You are most assuredly my kind of people...

    ReplyDelete
  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  3. "It includes a tiltable panel at the bottom so you can make the dice fall either of the two trays, as you choose.
    This seems almost useless, but I'm sure it was very important somehow to the game."
    Had this as a kid, the tower was set up between the players who would be sitting opposite each other.
    The tilt panel would be reset alternately between dice rolls so the dice would fall into the tray on the side closet to the player, instead of turning the tower around between turns.

    It was a great option for RPGs since the DM always had the option of setting up the tower in a way that didn't allow the players to know what the actual roll was . . . much easier for the DM to fudge important rolls.

    ReplyDelete