Catan Hex Dice Tower

thingiverse

I printed the marvellous dice tower from LennartS because when we play games in my family, we seem to spend about half our time retrieving over-zealously thrown dice from under the sofa. As soon as I printed it though, I realised that I absolutely had to spend a rainy weekend designing a hex version to go with my print of Dakanzla's Catan set . I have designed the tower to fit into a standard Dakanzla hex ring, and the little courtyard for catching your dice is also based on that. The courtyard has 5 little flag holders - at some point I plan on making some Catan resource flags for those with toothpicks. The tower itself reuses LennartS spiral staircase, but everything else is pretty much rebuilt in glorious hexagon form and put together in Tinkercad. You will need to print 2 x base hex rings and plugs to seat these two models onto, as well as your magnets of choice as per Dakanzla's instructions. PLEASE NOTE THIS IS STILL VERY MUCH A WORK IN PROGRESS - PRINT AT YOUR OWN PERIL As soon as I have finished tweaking the design and re-printed it all, I will be back here to no doubt update this! (made some edits to the tower - the windows were a little bit too low I felt posing a risk of dice being ejected so I raised them up a little. I also added a few more steps to the spiral staircase, and realised the central spindle of the stairs was round - fixed now to be a hexagon made some further edits to the tower to extend the staircase a little higher - now printing it off) UPDATE: Printed off the courtyard, fine quality in white PLA from 3DTomorrow. Took about 6 hours came out nicely (but of fine stringing which cleaned off easily) and fitted in the standard hex nicely. UPDATE: have finished printing the castle. Came out quite nicely except the door frame is slightly gappy and the jail bars had disappeared! Will fix and reupload here later UPDATE: So, having printed and used this now there are a few issues. The flag pole in the middle of the courtyard does (not unexpectedly) sometimes block the dice rolling, so I have done a MkII version that removes this. I have also added to this some little holders so that a rod can be inserted either side of the gap between the courtyard and the castle. This isn't really necessary as the dice tend not to escape through the gap, but I figured while I was editing it I might as well. I have not yet printed the MkII version yet. As for the castle, it is pretty good but I am not really happy with the corners of the walls - the joins between the brickwork on the walls looks a bit like a 1950's prefab building, which jars a bit here, so I am editing this model now to add some 'corner stones' to dress those corners better. While I am there I may also tweak the model grouping and tweak the staircase, and then upload a MkII castle. UPDATE Sorry, got sidetracked on this with life and stuff. Anyway, there is now a MkII castle and a MkIII courtyard which fix the issues I highlighted above. PLEASE NOTE I HAVE NOT PRINTED THIS YET - hopefully will get off my backside and do a print this week and let you all know how it goes!