Review of e-Raptor Battleground Dice Tower

Blurb from the publisher: 'The Battleground Dice Tower is the perfect decoration for your gaming night.'

What you get: Your EUR 45 or equivalent will buy you the e-Raptor Battleground Dice Tower, a dice tower for use with any fantasy game. The tower is made up of fifty two (!) pieces of high quality plywood and when assembled (no tools or gluing needed) has dimensions of 24,3 cm (height), 18 cm (width) and 18 cm (length). The tower is not rectangular; it is in fact hexagonal, emulating a tower with its yard. One can rest dice on the tower's top. The tower has moving parts; a winder moves a cogged wheel which moves another cogged wheel which slowly corals the dice inside the tower's entry point. From the moment the dice fall into the tower to the moment they hit the ground and rest, they will have touched six different platforms arranged like a spiral staircase.

The tower is a full-print, meaning that all its components are drawn upon. The tower's colours are mostly brown, with bricks painted on the tower's many components. Three figures stand on the tower's top: two knights and a dragon.

The strong points: The tower's unusual hexagonal shape is extremely inviting, no matter if you own one dice tower or a couple of dozen (coughcough). The figures on top of the tower are a nice touch, and even more so because the one on the absolute top will move every time the tower's mechanism moves.

The tower works in a slightly different premise than other dice towers. Its entry point is extremely small. One is expected to put the dice on top of the tower, and then turn the winder so that the cogged wheel will slowly bring the dice inside. It works, until it doesn't. Keep on reading.

When it comes to engineering, Battleground relies on e-Raptor's concept of not using force in order to put its components in place. Most of the interlocking pieces use the wooden locks that e-Raptor inserts in almost all its products. This makes assembly easier. Disassembling the tower is an equally easy affair, even though I prefer having mine permanently assembled, and to be fully honest, I would never recommend to anybody to disassemble a 52-piece dice tower.

Battleground earns extra points because it has a solid wooden base instead of a simple frame. This means that even if its resting area is slightly uneven, the dice will always rest in a clear and unambiguous way. Why aren't all dice towers like this?

Recognizing that the coloured wooden panels could get stuck upon one another, a thin films separates one from another inside the box. That's what I call thoughtful.

The weak points: Battleground is likely to have you annoyed already a few minutes into its construction. It is imperative that you watch the video on the publisher's website in order to assemble it. The instruction manual is useless. Many of its pieces should be inserted in their slots in only one way, yet the manual is very unclear about what that way is and the possibilities are quite many. I had to assemble and disassemble the bulk of the tower twice in order to find the right way to do it, that however is on me; I only read the manual and did not consult the video. The tower took me more than 30 minutes to assemble, an amount of time I find impossibly much for such a kind of affair.

This does not mean however that once construction finished I was suddenly happy with the final result. The dice tower simply does not work. I tried to make sure that nothing was stuck and that the winder would have turned properly, and the winder broke (flat-out broke) in my first gentle effort to turn it. What a spectacular failure. Looking at the winder, I am not at that much of a loss; it has too many weak points and can fail in many ways, taking into account the load that it has to take care of and the friction of all the weight on the tower's upper part against the rest of its components. I have already requested a new winder from the publisher. Consider it a test for their customer service. As soon as I have news from that front, I will comment on the present review.

So what happens if the winder doesn't work or breaks down, or if you simply don't care about the gimmick any longer and want to roll the old-fashioned way? One can always turn the big wheel by moving the smaller one, even though this isn't that obvious. What one can't do is throw the dice directly in the tower's insertion point. That area is only a handful of cm2 big, not to mention that it is partially covered by at least one, if not two, of the big wheel's spikes. There is no way one can throw more than one or two dice in there, unless he keeps on throwing them one by one. Buckets of dice? No way. I repeat: even if my winder hadn't broken in its very first turn, this is a tower that does not accommodate free-fall dice rolling. You have to use the winder, you have to use the gimmick. In the heat of the game, this patently sucks.

This is not however the tower's only problem. To start with, the arrangement of the spiral staircase makes the dice fall slowly, really slowly. Dice never gain momentum, never gather speed. In fact, and depending on their size and shape, there is a statistically high chance that they get stuck somewhere inside the tower. This is because there are many open points and sharp angles that dice which haven't gathered speed might not be able to overcome. I rolled hundreds of dice of various shapes and sizes in the tower (without the winder, of course), and over 2 to 5% of them never made it to the ground. That is a preposterous rate of failure; the most basic of dice towers handle this right.

Even when the dice reached the tower's yard however does not mean that they were as visible as I want my dice to be. The yard has such a shallow depth that the dice are almost right next to the tower, and even more so if you somehow managed to successfully roll many of them. Unless you sit right in front of the tower you just can't read the results. The tower's fence is also too high for such small a yard. Is this really a dice tower, or is it decoration in the guise of a tower?

This is by far the wobbliest, the most tottering dice tower I have ever handled. Most of its pieces are secured in just one place, and will shake as if there is no tomorrow every time you roll. If for any reason you like this design and you want to have that tower, you will have to use glue. I didn't, at least not during the playtests.

I can't but think that every time I roll my dice on this tower, I am effectively destroying its platforms and yard. Roll after roll, the full print of the platforms is getting dozens of micro scratches, of bumps, of scrapes and minor injuries. The more time passes, the more the effect will be exacerbated, until it resembles a worn-out football field where nobody tends the grass. It's a very weird feeling, seeing a gaming accessory getting damaged so insidiously just because one is using it normally. If I were e-Raptor, I would have immediately started selling the platforms and the base as spare parts. I am sure that some of us would like to have their tower look always brand new.

One can always say that dice towers distract from their 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 does not wish to see a castle-like device in his sci-fi game, then this tower will be an oddity.

Conclusion: The Battleground Dice Tower catches the eye, yet it is a gimmick, and a living proof that complex does not necessarily equate better. Once the first impression wears off, this is a dice tower that will gather dust in your shelf due to a design that is lacking in many aspects, namely because it forgot what a dice tower is primarily set to do: to allow dice to roll down fast, effortlessly, and visibly.

To find out more about e-Raptor and its Battleground Dice Tower take a look at http://e-raptor.pl.

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