Crafting challenge, week 1

This is where we ended.

I have a Table of Ultimate Gaming.  I like it a lot but it presents a couple problems.  These are made worse by the complexity of my game and the myriad gaming tools and props and whatnot that invariably clutter the playing space.  Today (well, this week) I'm going to try to fix that.

We've switched to playing on the top surface of the table to allow more space for writing stuff.  This is more convenient for scribbling notes or on character sheets or whatever but it's an absolutely lousy surface to roll dice on--the neoprene in the bottom of the table is way better.  Players also have a lot of game pieces to keep track of.  There are usually a mess of dice, these turn-based counter-y things that hold spindowns, and most of the time we use towers to get better mileage out of pretty dice that are badly weighted.  That got me thinking that I could solve multiple problems in one go.  So here we are.

This is where I thought we'd ended.

Construction is pretty much the normal deal except there are no removable parts or anything.  The base is Readi-Board because I wanted to experiment with it as a base material.  It holds a texture pretty well so it might be a good alternative to thin slabs of XPS.  The inner walls are also Readi-Board.  Texturing was done with the same pen and wad of foil as normal and it's painted quite poorly, I think.

The smaller area is intended for holding dice as shown.  Assuming my players aren't super drunk and can tell dice apart, this should work out OK.  In a pinch, the thinner towers with some modification will work in here too.  The large part is for the tower, and while the normal boxes do fit in there, I didn't think they fit well so I modified one to be without the...err...chinstraps...or whatever they are.  It fits the space pretty well and does work...sort of.

This is still a WIP (obviously).

The middle picture is what I thought was the final version.  A handful of things immediately became clear when doing the shoot and testing it.  The textured base looks cool but rolls like crap.  A piece of felt on the bottom helps this out quite a lot.  It also raises the base by a tiny amount which makes it slightly easier to pick out dice since the walls are about a quarter of an inch too tall.  The large area doesn't quite work as a rolling box without the tower and I find myself wanting another half inch or so at the bottom where dice are retrieved.

This was always intended as a prototype to see if the approach was reasonable.  We'll learn more when we play next weekend when I can get some actual feedback from actual players.  I rather expect this to go through several iterations before we arrive at a good form factor.  I think this is a good start, tho.