Some friends of mine recently decided to move ahead with their dream of opening a game store… board games, Dungeons & Dragons, Warhammer, Magic the Gathering, etc. It was an idea they’d had for a fairly long time, but situations finally evolved to a point where they decided it was the opportune moment to make it happen. The Adventurers’ Academy had its grand opening on May 1st, 2021 after months of my friends building out their store space by themselves in a medieval tavern style theme. The end result is amazing and it’s totally worth a visit even if you’re not nearby York, Pennsylvania. It’s definitely worth a drive.

That said, while they were in their plotting/planning/building phase, I decided I wanted to surprise them with a store-warming gift (is that a thing?) that fit in with their overall theme. I settled on building a dice tower for them, but it couldn’t be just any dice tower. It needed to have some gravitas… some stature… a uniqueness… an abnormally large and impractical scale. So I scoured the internet looking for some inspiration.

The first jolt of inspiration came from a couple who runs the Wicked Makers Youtube Channel. These amazing folks crafted a gorgeous dice tower using Zebrawood as their main material. I love the entire build, but the castle edge on the landing tray and the sign hanging from the front of the tower really caught my attention. So, like an idiot, I asked myself, “What can I do to make this not only absurdly complicated, but grandiose and intricate?”

This sketch was my initial answer to that question. I decided the top of the tower needed to be wider than the tower itself and needed to have the battlements. I also decided (tentatively at that point) that the castle should be sitting on an island in a “moat” and the dice should exit the tower, cross the drawbridge, and clatter into the courtyard with the satisfying clickety-clack of plastic on hardwood. The scale had yet to be determined at this point.

I had some nice exotic hardwood I’d gotten from Woodworker’s Source (without a specific project in mind), so I decided to use Granadillo and Roasted Red Oak as the main woods for the project. Granadillo has a beautiful rich reddish brown color. Roasted Red Oak has a darker brown color that turns almost black when it gets a finish. It’s also pretty brittle, which makes it a bit difficult to work with when cutting delicate angles (or battlements).

The tower itself was fairly straightforward, but the top needed to have some compound angles to make it angle up and out from the main tower at a 45-degree angle and then have vertical sides from there. My underworked and atrophied geometry skills told me that would be simple… just simple 45 degree miters and 45-degree crosscuts! Well… sadly no. As the picture of my prototype attests, there is nothing remotely correct about my hypothesis.

Heading back to the internet, I found tables listing the angles needed to create compound miters, but the first three tables I found all gave different answers. Then I found this video from Fine Woodworking which showed an easy way to create your compound angle setup with no math and no disagreeable angle tables.

It worked beautifully and the result was this weird shape, which then folded up into the angled base of the tower top. The miters met tightly when I did the real glue-up, but I did get a little bit of chip-out on a couple of the corners because I wasn’t used to working with the brittle roasted red oak. I figured it would turn black when I finish it and it wouldn’t be very noticeable (how’s that for a cop-out!).

After I got that piece cut, I added the vertical part of the tower top and cut the battlements. Everything was just taped together at this point so I could get a sense of proportion and make sure it all fit together the way I’d intended.

At this point, the tower was about eleven inches tall. I decided that I didn’t really need a lot of interior ramps or dowels for the dice to bounce off, so I just made it to accommodate a single 1/4-inch dowel right under the “funnel” that the top created.

I pre-finished the interior of the main tower with a single coat of brushed-on shellac before I glued it up. The little dowels seen in the picture are just plugging the holes so I wouldn’t get finish in them. In retrospect, I didn’t need to do that, since I didn’t need to actually glue the interior dowel in place.

The panel seams were all taped on the bottom side in the first photo. After the finish dried, I folded it all up into a box, added a bunch more tape to pull the miters tight, and awkwardly clamped it up using clamping squares to make sure everything was properly aligned.

In order to have the dice come out the door of the tower, I needed an interior ramp, so I came up with the idea of having two side pieces that angled into a center ramp that was angled toward the door. I created it out of MDF and then faced it with 1/8-inch thick slices of the roasted red oak.

I used the MDF for two reasons. First, the MDF won’t expand and contract (measureably) with humidity changes, so there wouldn’t be any worry of it expanding and popping the tower apart. Second, it seemed silly to waste that much of my roasted red oak when very little of it would be seen. Resawing and sanding the thin strips allowed me to use very little of that wood while still creating the same visual effect. When the ramp was inserted into the bottom of the tower, all the MDF would be covered by the tower walls, so only the roasted red oak would be visible.

To add some strength to the miter joints (and some visual accents to the tower), I added splines to all the corners of both the tower and the vertical part of the top. I cut the slots using my table saw spline jig (not pictured… sorry) and used slices of roasted red oak for the spline material. It blended in with the tower top, but ended up added some dark highlights to the tower itself. I cut them off with a flush trim saw and sanded it all smooth up to 320 grit.

One of the nice things about the two woods is not only the contrast in color, but also in the grain. The granadillo has a tight, fine grain, while the roasted red oak has large, open grain. It’s not a massive contrast, but I think it adds a nice bit of interest to the final piece.

I struggled for a bit coming up with the final design for the base… size of the overall base, the shape of the “courtyard” area, the height of the tower on its “island,” and a few other things. When I finally settled on the design, I ended up creating the island block for the tower to stand on, but then needed to create the overall base itself.

For my third wood choice for the courtyard, I chose some curly maple that I got from Good Woods Lumber, a local lumber yard that carries a big selection of domestic hardwood. I milled some pieces down to about 1/4-inch thick and had to do a panel glue-up (using my panel glue-up jig) to get a piece wide enough. I framed that inside a mitered frame of roasted red oak into which I had cut slots that would hold the panel but still allow it to expand and contract.

I created the enclosing walls (for the courtyard and the moat) out of narrow strips of the granadillo. It was a basic rectangle, but it also needed a middle divider to separate the moat from the courtyard. That divider also needed to be notched so that the drawbridge ramp would be able to angle from the tower door to the floor of the courtyard area.

I made the back wall of the rectangle a bit higher to accommodate a “Green Lion Woodworks” logo which my wife was gracious enough to laser engrave for me using her Glowforge. The corners of the walls were mitered and splined in the same way as the tower. I did cut a small dado in each of the side walls to hold the middle divider in place. That entire rectangle was then glued and clamped using an ancient X-acto Cinch 4-corner clamp that my wife dug up from somewhere. It worked great!

Two additional pieces of decoration I decided to add were a battlement outline for the tower door (shown in the final pictures at the end of this post) and some adornments for the front corners of the courtyard. I didn’t want to do battlements on the front wall like the Wicked Makers dice tower because my wall was only about an inch high. I came up with the idea of putting mini towers in the corners, but that seemed like a dauntingly intricate task to match the compound angles and battlements on the main tower.

Fortunately, the internet is just chock full of amazing designers! I thought of the rooks in chess sets which are basically little towers. A quick search of “square chess set pieces” came up with a hit to an amazing crafter named Vohnoutka Woodworks on Etsy that makes wooden chess sets in a mid-century modern style. I made two “rooks” using a similar style (which, oddly enough, is very similar to the newel posts on the main staircase in our house) and notched them so they would sit in the front corners of the courtyard flush with the outside edge of the wall.

For the sign on the front of the tower, I basically followed the same steps that Wicked Makers used except I had my wife cut out the sign on the Glowforge and engrave my friends’ store logo onto it so the whole thing would be branded exclusively for them (and me on the back wall, but that doesn’t count!).

I drilled a 1/4-inch hole into the front of the tower and cut a walnut dowel to act as the sign post. Some bronze crafting wire was used to hang the sign in place (after the finish was applied… I’m getting ahead of myself).

At this point, I just had a lot of pieces to finish, but I couldn’t just assemble everything and then finish it because some areas would be virtually inaccessible after assembly, nor could I just pre-finish everything, because I still had to glue some pieces together and the finish would interfere with the adhesion of the glue. I had to finish some pieces ahead of time (taping off the wood surfaces that needed to be glued) and some pieces after assembly. It was quite a merry orchestration of steps and I made sure I planned everything out before starting… and then double and triple checked my plan!

Here’s a picture of some of the pieces with some of the finish applied. You can see how the roasted red oak turns almost black and how the splines in the tower itself add a nice detail.

The finish I chose to use was a 1.5-pound cut of a dewaxed garnet shellac that was mixed from flakes. It added a rich color the the already beautiful wood and really brought out the detail of the grain in the granadillo.

The process I used was basically what is described in this video by Mike Pekovich from the Fine Woodworking website. It’s three coats of shellac, applied with a bundled cloth applicator, followed by a light sanding using 320-grit sandpaper, then another three coats of the shellac. A 1.5-pound cut of shellac is very thin, so it dries in less than 2 minutes. That means I can do the entire finish in under fifteen minutes. Once the last coat of shellac is dry, I added a coat of Johnson Paste Wax using #0000 steel wool and then buffed it off using a paper towel followed by a soft cloth. It leaves a silky smooth satin finish that feels great to the touch.

The blue “water” in the moat is pearl acrylic that I got from Rothco and Frost. I got an 8″ x 10″ sheet and cut it to fit around the tower’s island base. Combined with the yellow of the garnet shellac on the curly maple floor, it gives a nice color pop of contrast to the darker granadillo and roasted red oak.

Here are a few final glamour shots. The total height ended up being about thirteen inches. The base is ten inches by sixteen inches. If you’d like to see it in person and throw some dice through it, you can see it on display at The Adventurer’s Academy in York, Pennsylvania!

Dice Tower

Dice Tower

Dice Tower

Dice Tower

Dice Tower

Dice Tower (with Melody)