Review of e-Raptor Dinosaur Dice Towers: Triceratops, Tyrannosaurus Rex, Tyrannosaurus Rex 2, Velociraptor

Blurb from the publisher: 'Every Dinosaur Dice Tower from this collection (Triceratops, Tyrannosaurus Rex, Tyrannosaurus Rex 2, Velociraptor) has a different size and its own style. Their overprint is way better than anything we have printed on this material before - you can even feel the texture imitating the skin of a dinosaur. What is more, when assembling the tower, you can choose if you want to have the smooth surface on the outside or whether you prefer the one with the overprint. Every tower is easy to assemble; no glue is needed.

In addition to being a dice tower, all devices have a specific inside space where gamers can hold their dice.'

What you get: Your EUR 50 or equivalent will buy you one of the four e-Raptor Dinosaur Dice Towers: Triceratops, Tyrannosaurus Rex, Tyrannosaurus Rex 2, and Velociraptor. The towers are sold individually, making the present review a combo one. There is no prerequisite purchase; one can buy any, and as many, as he wishes. As usual, there is no shadow reviewing. E-Raptor graciously provided all four towers for me to playtest.

These dice towers can be used with any game that uses dice and can somehow fit dinosaurs into its theme (this includes Firefly, as expected). The size of each item varies:

Triceratops: 9 pieces, height 16 cm, length over 26 cm, width over 7 cm, weight 366 gr.

Tyrannosaurus Rex: 9 pieces, height 24 cm, length 21 cm, width over 7 cm, weight 544 gr (!).

Tyrannosaurus Rex 2: 7 pieces, height 20,5 cm, length over 27 cm, width over 7 cm, weight 372 gr.

Velociraptor: 9 pieces, height 15 cm, length over 26 cm, width over 7 cm, weight 396 gr.

All aforementioned lengths relate to the base of the items. If I also count their tails, they come out as much longer and more voluminous.

The side panels invariably depict a dinosaur of a different type and on a different pose. The Triceratops appears to gather momentum to attack. The Tyrannosaurus Rex is growling to the sky in a posture and design that is identical to the e-Raptor Small Dice Tower Tyrannosaurus Rex. Tyrannosaurus Rex 2 is much darker than his green brother, almost black in colour, and is growling sideways. Finally, the elongated Velociraptor appears to be on running mode. When it comes to the platforms where the dice roll, instead of having numerous different platforms like other towers do, these designs are more about creating a curved corridor that the dice will follow through gravity. From the moment one throws a die to the moment it hits the ground and rests, it will have touched only two different 'levels', even though those levels are comprised by more than two pieces.

The strong points: The basic premise behind dice towers is to save space on the gaming table. The four Dinosaur Dice Towers show the middle finger to this premise. They are huge, enormous, gargantuan, aiming to impress and scare, and not simply to help you roll your dice. Like any self-respecting dinosaur, they couldn't care less about your personal space, with their tales and bodies being substantially longer than the dice throwing area is. The Mesozoic era comes to your table in full force, and you'd better have the space to accommodate it.

To say that these towers are pretty is an understatement of proportions as gigantic as the towers themselves. They are gorgeous. I am torn between the textured side and the shiny side. The former is more subdued when it comes to colour, but when one touches it he can practically feel the scales. The other side has no texture whatsoever, yet when the light hits it your dinosaur while radiate its primal energies on every corner of the room. No matter which side you decide to have facing outwards, it is the right choice.

With the exception of the Tyrannosaurus Rex 2, the other three towers contain a small space in-between the legs of the dinosaur to keep your dice when you are not rolling them. That's not a bad idea, and especially since the towers take so much space anyway.

The towers are very easy to assemble once you understand how to. The whole ordeal of mantling the tower lasts about a minute. The pieces are sturdy and without small or flimsy-looking hooking extremities, which allows for a better use of force while assembling. The pieces are interlocking through movable yet practically unbreakable parts. If you make a mistake or two, you will be able to backtrack. You will be even able to fully disassemble the device for storage or transport, even though I wouldn't recommend making a habit out of it. You really don't wish to scratch the overprint.

Once built the tower is sturdy. There is no way a clumsy player will drop it down the table. The least heavy weighs more than one third of a kilo, while the heaviest ways more than half a kilo! I did not experiment by throwing them on the table from a resting position as I usually do when playtesting towers. Are you crazy? Did you see how heavy these things are?

The weak points: I did mention that these towers are enormous, didn't I? They demand an equally enormous table, no matter the game you are playing. They also demand some serious storage space, even if you decide to disassemble them. The longer pieces are quite long, trust me.

Dinosaurs are straightforward creatures. The towers do not hide their target group, i.e. the luxury market. Each of them costs as much as a big-sized game on offer. If your wallet protests violently, your wallet is right. I have no clue which one I would have picked if I had to choose only one of them. If space is a consideration, the smallest one is the Triceratops. If on the other hand you want to go gonzo on everything, the half-kilo Tyrannosaurus Rex is the best value for money. It is by far the biggest and meanest.

It goes without saying that if you want to use these towers as oversized minis, you can. I am not suggesting that they will be in the style of your other miniatures; they clearly won't. Finding minis of that size on the other hand would cost a lot more than EUR 50.

The towers are there to impress, and not necessarily to help you roll the dice. The base parts are unusually high for a dice tower, probably to keep the center of gravity low. Seeing how they are coloured, visibility over the dice-resting area is rather limited. Those farther away from the tower, say two to three chairs, will see pretty much nothing when it comes to the results, and I don't exaggerate a bit. Those right in front of it, will need to stoop and move their heads around a bit to see all the results, and especially if they rolled bigger quantities of dice. Self-defeating as this might sound, I can understand why it happened. With this particular design, looks trump utility.

One can always allege that dice towers distract from the game if their theme is not relevant. I do not feel that way; they are tools to use on the gaming table. If one however is a purist and plays a game that is totally irrelevant to dinosaurs, then he might have less use for the this tower than I do. Speaking of tools, like with any dice tower, wooden or plastic, rolling the dice on one is more noisy than rolling on the tablecloth or inside a game box.

Conclusion: Rowdy, loud, unforgettable; that's what this series of Dinosaur Dice Towers is. Taking the impact they have on your table and gaming mood into account, the fact that they can also be used as dice towers feels at times like an afterthought.

To find out more about e-Raptor and its range of Dinosaur Dice Towers take a look at http://e-raptor.pl.

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