Paula's Crafting Corner: A cardboard dice tower!

Posted by palabomeno on Jul 16, 2020

I love gaming equipment of all kinds. For some reason I’m very obsessed with the tools used to play a lot of common games: playing cards, billiard balls, dominoes, and especially dice. I can’t claim to be a serious dice collector, but I love looking at images of pretty dice on the internet and thinking about unusual dice shapes. One of my favorite accessories for dice is the dice tower.

So what is a dice tower? To put it shortly, a dice tower is a device used to help with rolling dice. This is accomplished using a box with offset ledges inside it. You drop your dice into the top of the tower, they bounce off the ledges, and come out perfectly rolled! This helps ensure that the roll is more random than just throwing the dice on the table, keeping the dice honest and preventing any “unlucky” dice or potential cheats from ruining your game.

Sound good to you? Well, what if I told you that you could build your own dice tower out of stuff you probably have hanging around your own home? Impossible, you say? Well, I don’t like your incredulous tone. Hit the jump and let’s learn how to build our own dice tower out of household materials… together!

Another great advantage of a dice tower is that it makes rolling large quantities of dice much easier. Some tabletop games use large quantities of dice rolled at the same time for actions - sometimes over a dozen in a single roll! This can be difficult and time-consuming to roll, and painful for some people. The tower eliminates this problem: just pour the dice into the top and out they come, rolled to perfection. Some dice are harder than others to roll, as well. The four-sided die is notoriously difficult to roll well, as it is a tetrahedron and will sometimes just slide across the table on its flat bottom. Dropping it into the dice tower ensure a perfect random roll every time.

Dice towers aren’t new technology by any means: check out this very cool dice tower from the 4th century! It’s made out of solid metal and is punched with Latin text. There were even bells that the dice could jingle as they rolled! Naturally, it’s only been recently with the invention of tabletop roleplaying games that dice towers have picked up as a trend. There’s a lot of very cool dice towers out there, some of them simple and affordable, some of them very fancy and expensive. 

Today, I’m going to show you how to make your own dice tower with only a simple handful of materials. You only need this:

• The box from a 12 pack of ramen
• Some tape
• Scissors

That’s seriously it. With these few ingredients, you’ll be rolling dice in style, no problem. First off, let’s talk about the box. I used the box from a twelve pack of Maruchan ramen, because Maruchan is the superior brand of instant ramen and that’s what I had. I don’t eat other brands of ramen, so I don’t know what other boxes will work. Looking at pictures of them on Google, Top Ramen appears to use a totally different kind of box for their 12 packs, and those definitely won’t work for this. Seriously, just run out to Wal-Mart or something and buy a dozen packets of chicken Maruchan, it’s like three dollars.

Secondly, you’ll want the tape. I used masking tape because that’s what I had. I recommend masking tape because it’s easy to remove, and you’ll probably want to re-stick the tape a few times to make sure you did it right. You could probably use any kind of tape for this. I don’t know how well Scotch tape would work, duct would be fantastic, maybe even electrical tape would do it. I just used masking tape. If you don’t have any tape, well, you probably should get some tape because glue isn’t going to work here.

And of course, you’ll need scissors. You can probably skip this one if you don’t have scissors, honestly! The Maruchan boxes are perforated along the parts you’ll need to cut, so if you’re careful and don’t rip the box while taking apart some of the sections that are glued together, you can do this with no scissors at all. I used scissors because it’s a lot easier.

So now that we have our mise en place in place, it’s time to decompile the box. Carefully detach the short flaps of the box from the long flaps, using your scissors to poke in there and sever the glue. Once things are feeling a little loose, you can get in there with your fingers and rip the flaps apart so the box’s cardboard now lays flat. See those four trapezoids? Those are the key to all of this. Now using your scissors, or by ripping very carefully, take the box apart into its component cardboard pieces.

Here’s the total amount of cardboard that we have:

• One large panel.
• Two long panels.
• Two short panels.
• Four trapezoids.

The long and short panels will form the body of your tower, and the trapezoids will make the internal baffles the dice will fall against as they roll. The very first thing we need to do is make the bottommost baffle, which must be longer than the others so your dice roll out of the tower instead of falling to the bottom of it. To do this, take two of the trapezoids and tape them together, diagonals touching, to form a square. It should look something like this:

I carefully taped them across the diagonal seam the two trapezoids make, then added an extra strip of tape across the middle for stability. In this project, more tape is better. You want everything to be as stable as possible. Try to coat everything you can in as much tape as possible.

Now that we’ve got the bottom baffle, let’s make the basic body shape of the tower. To do this, tape a short panel to a long panel, so that when arranged all four panels will make a box shape. You should tape the short panels on the same side of their respective long panels to accomplish this.

Those strips of tape are there for stability, and to make attaching the final baffles easier. You’ll be adding more tape later once the project is finished.

With the preliminary body shape finished, it’s time to tape the baffles to the body. You need to arrange the baffles in a zig-zag pattern so the dice will bounce off the first baffle, to the second baffle, and finally on the third baffle. If you tape it in a way that the baffles are pointed in the same  This ensures the best possible roll with the maximum amount of randomness. So place the baffles like this:

Tape the first baffle near the very top of one short panel.

Tape the second baffle in the middle of the other short panel.

Tape the third, square baffle near the bottom of the first short panel.

Tape them to the short baffles so the dice can fall out of the tower once they’re rolled. If the baffles were on the long panels, they’d just get stuck inside the tower. To tape the baffles correctly, you need to follow a pretty specific taping method. You need to apply a long strip of tape, tape it to the short panel, wrap it around the baffle itself, and all the way over back to the panel. Cradle the baffle in tape. Swaddle it. Once again, the more tape, the better. If you did it right, you should be able to stick the baffle up at an angle and it should be there. Try for a 45 degree angle or something, I don’t own a protractor.

The third baffle will need extra tape to keep it secure since it’s so much bigger than the others. Once you’ve got the baffles taped, you will have something that looks like this:

Get the champagne out of the ice now, because we’re in the home stretch. It’s time to put the whole thing together and make the actual tower. Now that we’ve got the baffles in place, we have to secure them to the long panels for maximum security. Tape the baffles sideways, so that you can tape them to the long panels. Once you’ve done this, the panels should be nice and secure at the angle they’re at. Tap them firmly. Make sure they don’t jiggle around too much, or that the tape falls off. This is a critical step! If you don’t make them as secure as possible, the baffle will fall apart when you’re rolling dice and everybody at the gaming shop will be very embarrassed for you.

It’s at this step you need to make sure the bottom-most baffle is at a good angle so the dice can actually fall out of the tower. I’ve made the mistake before of having this baffle too high up and at a bad angle, so there was no room for the dice to actually leave the tower. This shouldn’t be hard, if you can visualize it.

Now we’re at the finale. Place the two panel arrangements together so they form a box. Make sure that the long panel is facing the other long panel, and the same goes for the opposing short panels. If you look down into it, you should be able to see the zig-zag pattern that the baffles make, provided you arranged them correctly. Now, carefully, wrap the whole kit in tape. Really mummify it with lots and lots of tape. Now is not the time to be cheap on the tape. And one last, kind of optional thing: if you want to tape the baffles to their opposing long panels for extra security, now is the time to do it. I recommend it.

That’s it! You’re done! You just made a dice tower! Go grab yourself a handful of your favorite gaming dice and toss them in. Congratulations!

But wait, I hear you say. When you throw your dice into the tower, they just roll all over the place! How are you supposed to use this if your dice are just going to roll off the edge of the table? Not to worry, my friend. Did you perhaps think I neglected the large panel?

Take the large panel and place your finished tower against its short edge, in the center. Using your pair of scissors, cut a notch about two inches long on either side of the tower, slightly wider than the tower itself is. Fold the now cut out middle section upwards, and fold the side sections up and around the middle sections. The final result should look a little like a chalupa shell. Then apply a lot of tape around this little origami you made, and hey presto, you just made a dice tray! Because you cut it to the size of your tower, your tower can fit snugly inside it with no fear of your dice rolling anywhere except where you can see them. 

I also like to put a little tape around the open section of the tray, to make sure no rogue dice bounce around under the tower and fall out the back. You can put a piece of tape over the exposed sticky part, so there’s no tape glue getting all dusty back there. If you feel like your tower is a little too loud when you roll, you can tape a few pieces of something soft to the baffles and throw a few napkins or a washcloth into the tray, that’ll muffle the sound just fine.

And that is really all there is to it. A quick and easy craft to pass the time on a grey afternoon, using materials you probably already had - and if you didn’t, they only cost about six bucks, depending on how much tape costs where you live. Now all that’s left is to show it off! Paint it bright and vivid colors! Take it to your next D&D game - your group will be begging you to know how you did it!

See you all next time at Paula’s Crafting Corner! Tomorrow’s recipe: Chicken!

Categories: ways

Tagged: crafting dice dice tower diy tabletop gaming tutorials