Below are photos of a dice roller I made a few years ago using plaster bricks I formed using Castlemolds, a hobby I first described here. You glue the bricks into any design you like and then paint them.
The idea of a dice roller is to have a place for rolling dice in a miniatures game or any other type of game so that they don’t interfere with the playing pieces or roll off the table. (And they’re mostly just for fun, really.)
I’ve seen some dice rollers in the shapes of towers. You drop the dice from above and they cascade down a series of ramps inside the tower to tumble out into a “courtyard.” I’ve even seen one that was a bell tower in which the dice hit bells on their way down, chiming. I’ve made a tower-type roller, but haven’t taken photos of it yet.
The one I’ve made here, which I finally got around to photographing, is meant to look like the basement of an inn. There is plenty of space for rolling dice and one can even store extra dice on the bench.
The bench, meant to provide a hearty backstop for tumbling dice, is made from craft sticks glued to wood blocks. The floor is a piece of vinyl glued to foamcore and drybrushed with three shades of gray to look like stone. The bricks are painted with the same shades of gray and highlighted with two types of brown to pick out individual stones. (The actual bricks of plaster vary in length but are all half-an-inch tall.)
I painted the barrels and other accessories, which come from different miniatures companies, with paints made specifically for miniatures. Craft paints were used on the bricks. The dice are smaller than the usual type, about half-an-inch across.
