It’s been a minute, so lets hop into the Way-Back machine and visit the year 2021… in June.

Shortly after my friends opened The Adventurers’ Academy, I got it in my head that, since I’d built a ginormous dice tower for the store, I could make a bunch of smaller ones for them to sell. This seemed like a great idea. I say “seemed” because I was ignoring the fact that I generally dislike making more than one of anything.

But off I went, anyway!

To get proportions all worked out and make sure I had a viable design, I made a prototype out of pine. It was basically the same as the big dice tower I’d made, but without all the fancy stuff. It was sized a bit bigger than a can of soda and used the same inside mechanics to tumble the dice: two crossed dowels that would bounce them around.

Since there was no hanging sign to decorate the front of the tower, I bought a variety of D&D’esque coins and embedded them in the front. The effect was pretty good, I thought.

In addition to making a prototype for scale, I knew I needed to make a bunch of jigs to handle cutting all the little pieces, aligning the various holes, and cutting out the top of the turret structure. Having to make a lot of jigs to make repetetive cuts should have been a noticeable red flag… but I do like making jigs, so… caution to the wind!

(I make this sound terrible, but I did enjoy making them, but after making fifteen, I was done)

After the jigs, I made some cool lumber selections and started milling up everything to the correct thickness. Then the jigs earned their keep… and then some. For the first batch, I made six towers. Each turret structure consists of eight pieces. The tower has four walls, two dowels, one ramp, one coin, and one “Green Lion Woodworks” medallion on the back. Assembly was similar to the big tower, but simpler.

The inside of the tower proper was finished with shellac before assembly, but I used an oil finish on the outside because all the nooks and crannies would have made any type of varnish finish pretty tedious.

They turned out pretty well and they sold almost immediately. I made six more including a couple “themed” ones (the “Ranger” tower is shown below) and those six sold as well. The only ones I’ve made since then were for a good friend who wanted one for each of his two kids and one for… someone else (it’s been a long time).