-
Level One Noob
United States
Maryland
Come read my Arkham Horror stories on Twitter @ArkhamHorror
Image courtesy of Smizmazmarlemagne
-
And now for something new...
The "Process"
One of the most commonly asked questions I receive from people who comment on my LEGO brick dice towers is "Do you have a life?" That one is easy to answer: no, no I don't. But a close runner-up to this question is "How do you build these dice towers?" This one is tougher to answer.
The "Process" involves a mix of planning based on a encyclopedic knowledge of the sort of pieces I have available (especially ones that I have too many of that aren't in a creation yet) and the ultimate goal. Often what I build is completely dictated by the pieces I know I need to use that are in shortest supply. After making this rough assessment and hoping that I haven't miscalculated before I get too far into building, I then consider what games I own could (A) use a dice tower and (B) could have a relevant dice tower made for them out of what I have available.
Case Study: Labyrinth Dice Tower
Phase I: Inception
At this point it is probably good to turn to a particular new example. So for this blog entry, we will be building a dice tower for the new game "Labyrinth: The War on Terror". I picked this game because I own it, I like it, it uses dice, and I thought I could make a relatively simple-to-demonstrate LEGO dice tower for it.
What drew me to choosing Labyrinth in particular is the attractive black and green cover, both colors easily reproduced in my LEGO collection. I could see a half and half black/green dice tower that looked very sharp and evoked the game nicely. Of course, that in itself would be quite boring, so we need to spice it up with some of the box cover's added flourishes. Despite the fact I would love to try to create the war-fighter on the cover, some things are too difficult to do accurately in LEGO. So instead, I focused on the nice little "White Knight" symbol at the top of the box.
Phase II: The White Knight
Even this is quite complicated to render in LEGO accurately. The smooth curves are almost impossible as the smooth curved pieces in LEGO that I own don't correspond to these. So I decided to try my best with using blocks and angles and plates that evoked the abstract shape of the knight. The result is below. Bear in mind that this simple element took more time to design than the entire rest of the tower. Getting these details right and making sure you have just the right pieces for them is very difficult!
Phase III: Groundwork
After this it was time to begin work on the tower proper. I cannot stress enough the importance of having LEGO tiles to make these towers work. These tiles have no connection studs on top and when used together make beautiful smooth surfaces. Below is the well of the dice tower. My preference would have been to use gray tiles, but honestly I didn't have enough, so instead I decided to use the black and green colors again. Fans of Labyrinth will note that these are backwards. This was to get a nice contrast with the walls which would be their reverse.
Next I began collecting the slope pieces that would serve as the ... well, slope of the bottom of the dice tower. Now, in this case I did have a nice variety of gray, dark gray, and blue gray, which I used to try to evoke the field of gray on the cover. You'll also notice that I have built the walls surrounding the well and applied a tile top to these as well.
After this, I began structuring the slope. Now for the dirty secret of LEGO building. Yellow bricks. These garish things are useful for one thing only, holding up other bricks. So most of my creations have yellow bricks lurking beneath the surface providing structural support. I welcome all ideas for a cool looking yellow dice tower, but so far, I've found this is their almost exclusive use, and LEGO sure does love doling them out in their brick buckets.
At this point, I start adding yellow arches to hold up the higher slopes.
Here you can see that I am building up the dice tower walls, which will interlock with the interior support to make the whole things hold together well and feel very sturdy.
At this point the bottom slope is complete with a nice speckling of different gray bricks and you can really start to see how the well tiles contrast nicely with the walls of opposite colors.
Phase IV: Tumblers
Next I begin to consider what I am going to do in order to handle the interior "tumblers". So I begin working inward until I can lay out supports for the slopes that will go inside.
Uh oh, I almost forgot, there's supposed to be a front to this dice tower. So I then add bricks that sort of loosely hang off the front. I then add a long gray plate to hold them together. Even though some of these bricks are only really being supported from above, the gray plate really helps well in resisting the effects of gravity.
Right, we're supposed to have a white knight on the front of this LEGO tower dealie. I hadn't really thought about how to put the white knight on the front, so I lop off the bottom plate of the knight and place a plate that is one wider and then hook that onto the wall. I'll then build around that plate and that will hold the bottom of the knight in place. Fortunately, the top of the knight also aligns with the wall, so we'll figure out some way to connect it when we get up to it.
Here, you see as I begin the next set of slopes, in black because well, I'm running low on gray and black will look good from the top.
Intermission
And I'm running low on green bricks and black slopes. So I make a trip to the local LEGO store and buy more bricks from the wall. Yes, one of the keys to my secrets of being able to make things is going to the LEGO store and doing this. Unfortunately, though the selection is often good, you are hampered by what they had (for instance, they had NO tiles this time, which is not a problem since I bought a boatload of tiles on my last trip, but it's always a crapshoot).
Phase V: Tumblers Continued
OK, now we have enough to finish the tower, and here we see the second level completed.
From here we begin the top set of slopes which are positioned so dice can fall through, but forcing them to always hit one or the other of the tumblers.
Now we're getting close to the end as we keep stacking green and black bricks. Note that you should always try to interlock wherever possible. In places where it is not visible in the final product, the green and black bricks are interleaved to make them more sturdy.
Phase VI: The Top
And we're now at the very end, I've hooked the knight to the top of the tower by way of a 1x2 white plate. And I've applied the green and black tiles to the top and we're done ... and wait ... not everthing is tile over ... dammit, I don't have ANY green 1x2 tiles. ARGGHH... all this work for nothing! OK, there has to be a solution that won't look dreadful.
OK, perhaps we can get a 1x3 slope and use that to add smoothness and a contour to the top of the tower without having any ugly studs on top.
And Ta-da, it's done. Now we can go play Labyrinth!
The Aftermath
OK, so maybe this is not as helpful as people really wanted, but it should give you at least an idea of what's involved in building these towers out of LEGO bricks and tiles. The key points to emphasize here are that this takes A LOT of pieces. I'd estimate this particular tower is about $75-110 worth of LEGO bricks (though this is quite hard to judge as you seldom just buy exactly the pieces you need) so it gets very expensive very quickly.
Now the question I often get alongside "How do you build these dice towers?" is "How do I build these dice towers?" That is tough to say, especially if you're not already deep into the LEGO hobby. Building these things takes a lot of practice, patience, experience, and an enormous collection grown over the years. Telling you where to go to find pieces like the tall inverted white slope piece or 1x4 green tiles is difficult because my collection is drawn from sets bought for decades and broken down as well as whatever becomes available at the local LEGO store. Perhaps in my next entry I can try to give more specific advice to this point of building your own dice towers and where to go to get started.
|
|
