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Review of e-Raptor Dice Tower Gargoyle
Blurb from the publisher: 'Dice Tower Gargoyle is another of our large dice towers with a medieval/fantasy theme. It is made of high quality HDF, is has a new shape, as well as an improved, great looking and detailed overprint. All this makes it the perfect decoration for your board game night.'
What you get: Your EUR 25 or equivalent will buy you the e-Raptor Dice Tower Gargoyle, a dice tower for use with any game with a strong medieval or fantasy theme. The tower is made up of seventeen pieces of high quality plywood and when assembled (no tools or gluing needed) has dimensions of 20 cm (height), 13 cm (width) and 23 cm (length). From the moment one throws the dice to the moment they hit the ground and rest, the dice will have touched three different angled platforms. Its rest yard is big, and at 110 cm2 can practically accommodate bucketfulls of dice.
The dice tower has an overprint, and depicts a monolithic, opaque tower whose entry is guarded by a grinning gargoyle holding a six-sider. It has designs on every external surface of its components, the internal surfaces however show themselves for what they are, namely pieces of wood. The tower also has engraved elements following certain of its patterns and designs. Its colours range from black and grey to blue-black, with some of the stones showing on the building's walls. The tower ends in ramparts, and hosts a rectangular upper resting area for you to store your dice before your roll them. The tower has a solid wooden base.
The strong points: I was used to dice towers where one could partially see the dice tumbling from one platform to another. This is not one of them. This is the darkest prison, the place where you roll and you ultimately wait for the result to positively surprise you. Until then, you can appreciate the details of a design that meshes its colours to its engravings. There are only a few of the latter, something that makes me believe that the technology is still not ripe for fully textured, full-colour towers. We are however slowly getting there, and the present tower is a tease for what we will see in the future.
When it comes to engineering, e-Raptor is ahead of the competition. Its interlocking pieces use the wooden locks that e-Raptor inserts in almost all its products. You don't need brute force to assemble the tower; you only need to cleverly insert and click the joints where needed. Disassembling the tower is an equally easy affair, even though I prefer having mine permanently assembled. Once built the tower is solid and can take quite some damage. No glue was needed; the thing feels as if it came together in one piece. I wouldn't recommend stomping on it, yet clumsily hitting it or even dropping it from the table didn't appear to cause damage.
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.
Dice Tower Gargoyle copies the e-Raptor Galaxy Portal Dice Tower by providing space at its top to rest your dice before the next time you need them. Its upper platform has a flat area of just under 100 cm2 for one to leave his dice. Ten standard-sized twenty-siders fit there; how many do you actually roll in your game? The tower's insertion point is adequate, with a surface of over 30 cm2. Combine all those together, add its big yard, and you can see how this tower can accommodate dice pools of any size.
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 overprint and full print products. Bonus points for consistency.
The weak points: The tower should have been a relatively easy one to assemble, yet thanks to the substandard instructions it ultimately becomes a chore. Some of the tower's components are unique, and should be used only in one place with one particular orientation. Yet, the instructions are as opaque as the tower itself. I am tired of e-Raptor not including coloured instructions in its products, relying in black and white copies where the details are simply not visible. I made not one, but at least three mistakes while assembling the tower and had to disassemble a large portion of it twice. Thankfully, no damage was caused and the finished product is as sturdy as it could have been. Yet I wasted substantially more time than I needed to, and was at times afraid that my deconstruction of the piece could lead to its demise. That shouldn't have been the case. Instructions need to be crystal clear, with every single detail pointed out.
The tower has quite the footprint on the table, while its volume make it rather daunting. If don't have that much space on your table you might want to search elsewhere.
After copying the Galaxy Portal Dice Tower's strong points, Dice Tower Gargoyle also decided to copy one of its weak ones. Thus, it is not optimally designed for small-sized dice. Its yard does not just have a fence, it also has a protective rim above it. Yet, that rim has a distance of more than 1,1 cm from the tower's base. If your dice are smaller than this size, they can become partially obscured by the rim, an otherwise irrelevant, decorative element. That's extremely unthoughtful engineering. A dice tower should contain the dice you roll within it and provide a clean and easy-to-read roll no matter the dice's shapes and sizes. If it fails that, its embellishments and decorations add insult to injury.
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 hard sci-fi game this tower would feel absolutely irrelevant.
All full print and overprint towers share the 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 is 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.
Conclusion: When assembled the Dice Tower Gargoyle is an imposing tower that will serve your game right... unless you use dice of smaller sizes. The instruction manual should have been better written, at the end of the day however you are going to only assemble the tower once.
To find out more about e-Raptor and its Dice Tower Gargoyle take a look at http://e-raptor.pl.
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