Tuesday, December 29, 2015

Custom Dice


As a last minute Christmas craft gift for some of the people we exchange presents with, my wife came up with the idea of "Foodie Dice", or rather came up with the idea of copying the Foodie Dice.  For those unfamiliar, this is a way to deal with First World excess by reducing the choice of what and how to cook to the roll of dice.  Emergent cooking if you will.

The details of replication were left to me, and I found a set of 1" wooden cubes on amazon, and read a few tutorials about making stickers using our Silhouette Cameo, and away I went.  I produced four sets of six dice, and banged them out rather quickly thanks to using the Cameo's print and cut feature, which allows you to design both the print and cut portions of a project at once. I was able to make 144 identical squares, and as they were on sticker paper, applying them to the cubes was easy.

I think that it would be extremely easy to produce a custom dice this way, and could even use symbols in place of the squares provided they were not too complex in shape.  Think X-wing dice, or weather dice, body locations, and the like.  Unfortunately I was not able to find wooden blanks for other common dice shapes, although I suppose you could use this to place stickers on regular dice.  For actual game use, I suspect that a couple of coats of spray sealer would be useful for longevity, and a stain for the wooden blocks might add some interest as well.

You might also see in the foreground a partial imperial eagle... I was after all sitting there with the design software, and it seemed rude not to produce something for my hobby while I was there... this test did not come out quite right (the blade hung up on cutting the beak of one of the heads, and the stickers were just a bit small to handle without tools), but now it will be a simple matter to make an imperial eagle stencil.

1 comment:

Scalene said...

Interesting idea. I might try stencilling symbols on for custom rules.