Rolling dice – nothing could be simpler right? That’s what I thought until I had children. Alpha (Girl, 8) tries to cheat if she thinks no-one is looking by turning the dice to a more favourable value after rolling it, or just pretending to roll it and announcing she got a critical hit. Beta (Boy, 6) seems to think the dice are ninja throwing stars, and causes damage to anything on the table, the other players, the dog, the walls, the roof, neighbours, passing traffic, low flying aircraft etc. We are often required to crawl around on the floor looking for wayward d20s. Some days I feel we are LARPing rather than playing on the tabletop.
A “dice tower” can fix this, with the added bonus of making the rolling more fun. Drop the dice in the top of the tower, and they jiggle their way to the bottom where they pop out neatly into a tray, properly randomised.
Since I’m doing this whole cheapy thing, I decided to make my own dice tower. I used stuff from the collection of household items we keep for kiddie-craft purposes:
- 2 hard plastic tubes (which originally held Aldi effervescent vitamin B tablets)
- the lid off a 6-egg carton,
- some cardboard tubes (from rolls of kitchen paper towels)to act as scaffolding, and
- some duct or gaffers tape.
The hard plastic tubes were just the right size for 16mm dice to fit through without snagging. I sawed (well, serrated kitchen knifed) the bases off the bottom at an angle, so I could join these together at approximately a right angle.
Then holes were cut in the cardboard tubes to hold the hard plastic tubes in a < shape, a few centimetres off the ground. Duct tape was applied liberally to reinforce the structure.
Finally the egg carton lid was fastened underneath the exit hole to catch the dice as they rolled out of the tube..
The upside – it works like a champion, reducing (though not entirely eliminating) both the cheating and wild throws to a minimum. It also makes it easier for the kids to share a singe set of dice.
The downside – it looks like some sort of weird drug paraphernalia. The first time my children see a bong, they are going to wonder where the dice come out.
My second choice for a self-made dice tower would have been to use a milk carton with a few angled cuts in it to hold some shelves to emulate a commercial dice-tower, but since my first attempt worked so well there is no need to pursue this. If you do, let me know how it works!
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CYA next time.
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