Building Your Own Dice Tower

If you’ve ever played a board, tabletop miniatures, or role-playing game with lots of gaming materials, playing pieces, and maybe terrain on the table, you know how much havoc an errant dice roll can cause. Especially in games where you are shaking and rolling fistfuls of dice, it’s inevitable that someone is going to end up rolling an unwelcomed strike on the contents of the game board. The answer to this destructive threat is the dice tower, a game accessory that allows your rolls to land within a safe, fenced-in area.

A dice tower is a very simple device. It’s basically a long rectangular tube that you toss the dice into and a landing tray at the bottom, with walls, to constrain and display the resulting roll. There is also often baffling inside to direct the dice. As you might imagine, there are tons of designs online for these towers. Here are a few of my favorites.

I absolutely love this collapsible laser-cut tower design by Martin Raynsford. It includes two parts, the tower/tray and a baffle system that slips inside. The whole thing is held together with “living hinges.” Very, very cool. If you have access to a laser cutter, you can make your own using the SVG file found here. [Via Adafruit]

As you might image, the tower design of these dice accessories lends itself to castle towers so you can find many such designs online. Here is one of the award-winning designs on Instructables.

There are many tower designs on Thingiverse, many of them the castle tower variety. But here is another design I like, for a portable dice case and dice tower.

In this video from the San Diego Mini Maker Faire, John Redman talks about the development of his laser-cut dice tower designs and how the maker movement inspired him to begin making and sharing them.

If you want to survey all of the dice tower designs before you decide which one to build, check out these search results on YouTube, Instructables, and Thingiverse.