Review of e-Raptor Steam Punk Furnance Dice Tower

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

What you get: Your EUR 45 or equivalent will buy you the e-Raptor Steampunk Furnace Dice Tower, a dice tower with a strong industrial and steampunk theme.

The tower is made up of fifty six (!) pieces of high quality plywood as well as four 3-part sets of screws. When assembled (no gluing needed) it has dimensions of 19 cm (height), 22,5 cm (width) and 14,5 cm (length). The tower has a peculiar, mostly rectangular shape with an additional rectangular protrusion. It emulates a furnace. The tower's mouth is covered by trap doors which can be left either opened or closed. The tower has two moving parts. The aforementioned door traps are the first. A player can open or close them through the use of a lever. The doors leading to its rest yard are the second. These can be opened or closed through the cogs underneath the tower, and by gently pushing the doors themselves. The doors do not open automatically when dice are rolled inside the tower, nor is the strength of a roll adequate to force them open. When opened, the doors create the side walls of the yard so that the dice don't spill over. From the moment the dice fall into the tower to the moment they hit the ground and rest, they will have touched three different platforms.

The tower is a full-print, meaning that all its components are drawn upon. The tower's colours are mostly black, red, and brown, with all their accompanying hues. Two big non-functional gauges are depicted on the tower which uses no less than ten different cogs to perform its functions.

The strong points: I am not particularly drawn to steampunk, yet this dice tower catches the eye. It has a domineering presence, with all the colours and details done right. The hues change smoothly into one another, giving the impression of a well-used furnace. The gauges and buttons are pretty, while the doors close menacingly above the tower's red base. The lever that opens the trap doors on the tower's mouth resembles a pair of bellows, while the cogged wheels look impressive even when they are static. After the first few times of opening and closing the trap doors, nobody will bother with the lever and will keep all doors permanently open. Even in this state however the tower still looks impressive. Its mouth is large enough to accommodate a handful of dice, even though its rest yard is medium sized and cannot accommodate overly large pools of dice.

When it comes to engineering, Steampunk Furnace 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 much safer. Disassembling the tower should also be a straightforward affair, even though I prefer having mine permanently assembled. I would never recommend to disassemble a 56-piece dice tower in the first place.

Solid wooden bases make a difference when it comes to improving the visibility of a roll. Even if the tower's resting area is slightly uneven, the dice will always rest in a clear and unambiguous way. All dice towers should have a solid base, honestly.

E-Raptor has done a great job when it comes to packaging the tower. Recognizing that the coloured wooden panels could get stuck upon one another, a thin films separates one from another inside the box. That is something that the company does systematically in all its full print products. Bonus points for consistency.

The weak points: E-Raptor insists on providing sub-par, black-and-white versions of instruction manuals that were very obviously designed in full colour. The result? If you had one minor chance of understanding them in colour, that chance is significantly reduced in black and white. This is by far the most complex tower the company has designed, and the instruction manual is outright poor. Not only it condenses several steps in only five (and at least two of them are overly complicated), the black-and-white rendition of the manual also makes an already hard job even harder. It does not insist on details which are crucial in getting the tower right, not to mention that it omits a couple of the easiest steps. It is more than certain that you will need to disassemble elements of the tower at least once, in order to give it yet another try. Each time you do this, the chance of elements breaking down rises exponentially: at least two minor elements of my tower broke during assembly already. Am I happy about it? No, I am fuming. In contrast to the equally complex and also gimmicky and poorly designed e-Raptor Battleground Dice Tower, the present one was not deemed worthy of a full assembly video the way the designers envisaged it. You should better be dexterous, because this is not an easy affair to assemble. The ads are all about 'no glue', in reality however you will need an infinitesimally small hex key in order to screw the screws properly. I am willing to bet serious money that no one can assemble this tower without getting at least partially annoyed.

Even if you fully understand and follow the instructions to the hilt, the end-result is far from guaranteed. The wheels cannot be either too lax or too tight, and good luck finding where the balance lies. The way they are engineered means that most of the times you will need to press the trap doors from both sides if you don't want to damage the device. Forget about the furnace's yard door. This is nothing but a gimmick, seeing how it only opens if you raise the tower from the table. In other words, you are going to spend a big amount of time assembling a dice tower (over 30 minutes, in my case), in order to have a furnace that gives the impression of mobility, while in reality you will all its doors permanently open. This is practically deceptive advertising; these wheels serve at nothing.

Ultimately, does the tower work as a simple dice tower? The answer is again disappointing: kind of. The big iron-like furnace doors are aesthetically pleasing, yet they practically eliminate visibility inside the tower's yard if you sit on its sides. You need to sit straight at the front of the tower if you want to be absolutely certain that you will immediately read the result without needing to bend and stoop. This is pretty much the point where the tower stops caring about its prime function and becomes geeky decoration of the random type.

All full print towers share the exact same problem. Every time you roll your dice you are 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.

Dice towers may distract from their game if their theme is not relevant. If you desperately need a dice tower any of them is good enough, on the other hand however I also understand that in a fantasy game such an advanced furnace would feel out of place.

Conclusion: The Steampunk Furnace Dice Tower is the second tower that tries too hard to be spectacular while failing in most of the basic requirements that make a dice tower what it is. It ultimately works as a flawed basic tower with limited visibility, yet you will pay dearly for the privilege. No gauge and cogged wheel will save you if the dice are not visible from most angles, and you can't win friends if the trapdoors above and the furnace doors below are just for show.

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

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