Craft Corner, Dice Masters

Dice Masters Game Night Case

Posted onAuthorjourdo

Welcome to Mutation, a series of articles where we want to spotlight the “extras” that you can bring to Dice Masters.  Why Mutation?  Well, it represents a fundamental change in something.  An evolution of sorts.   Also, there is that nice Basic Action Card that shares the name.  It seemed to make sense to connect these together to represent what this series is meant to be about.

We are always working on growing our collection of tutorials to help bring your game to the next level.  Want to learn how to make your own cards?  How about customizing your own play-mat?  Looking for come cool dice tower projects?  This is where you want to be.

If you have something you want to share with the Dice Masters community, drop us an email at mailbag@dm-north.com and let us know.  We look forward to sharing these projects with you.  As always, please feel free to leave your comments below and let us know what you think.

Now, on to today’s project…

The Dice Masters Game Night Case Project

This project was born out of necessity more than anything.  We all have the same problem.  Transporting our Teams from our home to the local Game Store.  Sure there are lots of options out there, but I wanted an all in one type solution.  Something that would store an entire Team, including everything you should need to play a night of Dice Masters.  I know Zen Bins are a thing, but I personally did not like the look of them.  That is just a personal preference thing.

I am an avid user of Thingiverse, and I was hoping to find something here to suit my needs.  Unfortunately, nothing was quite right.  However, there was this Thingy (by MementoMori) that had some potential.  It looked like a nice dice storage solution, but was a not a complete solution.

I envisioned something to hold my Sidekick and BAC dice as well.  It would be easy enough to make some changes to the tray to accommodate the extra dice.  Now I needed to solve my card issue.  The simple solution was to make another tray to hold the cards.  Basically, using the dice tray as a template, I was able to make a tray that would hold the cards and gave some extra room for tokens or extra dice.  Now I had two separate trays and couldn’t use MementoMori’s design.  However, it was fairly easy to make a double decker version of this.  And so, version 1.0 of the case was born…

This version was printed on a SLA printer from work.  The Flash logo was just some bling I wanted to add to the design.  The dice tray fits a 20 dice Team, 8 Sidekicks, and 12 BAC dice.  The card tray fits 10 sleeved cards comfortably, as well as colour indicator cards for the BAC’s (these are unsleeved for me).  I noted a few issues with this first design:

  1. The trays were way too loose in the case.  There was no way they would stay in place as planned.
  2. The case itself proved fragile and broke after a few weeks.  This was partially due to the design and also due to the material.  This type of resin is not really good for this purpose.  The thickness of the walls was just not there.  This design also had a hollowed out middle to save on resin costs, which proved more detrimental than helpful.

So, the tray design was great but the case itself needed some work.  Back to the drawing board and version 2 was created…

You can see the changes here.  The trays fit way better in this version.  I also added in a border on the top and bottom edges to strengthen the weak points and also add in a little decorative feature.  The centre divider was now one solid piece.

This design functioned fairly well, but again, was still fragile.  I played around with a few different resins but they were not great for this use.  This material was also really expensive to print with.  I needed to find an alternative.

Some time passed and as I got closer to Christmas, I ended up purchasing a PLA Extrusion Printer for home use.  This gave me multiple colour options and a material that should resist some of the breakage I was experiencing with the resin.  I reprinted the above design and discovered that the tray was fitting TOO well.  It was almost impossible to remove.  I tweaked the design many more times until I came up with the final prototype (I wish I could remember what version this actually was… but it was up there numerically).

This was the one.  The trays were tight, but not too tight.  The dice fit well.  The cards were good, and the storage section was good enough to tuck a few things into it.  I went into production to make some of these for my local community for Christmas gifts.  The prototype made its way cross-country to ccm0007.

A closer look at these can be seen in the gallery below.  I did decide to make one final adjustment with the design that was not on this batch.  I changed the labels on the card and dice trays to look more like the Dice Masters logo.

After coming up with this final tweak, I decided to create a generic “production model” for this case.  I contacted DM Armada and asked if I could use one of his designs on the case.  I loved his Dice Masters/Olympic Ring mash-up he made and it turned out really cool in the final product.  Thank you again to DM Armada for letting my use your awesome art on this.

Now to the question that I know is coming:  “Where can I get this?”  I will be 100% honest and I did look into selling this, but postage rates in Canada are too unreasonable that it was not going to be cost effective to even attempt it.

After much deliberation, I have decided to make this design available to anyone who wants it for free.  However, the design you can download is a bare-bones design.  There are no logos or text on this design.  If you want to customize it, you are free to do what you want with it (for non-commercial purposes), or contact me and we can work something out.  You can download the STL files from Thingiverse here.

I wanted to close out this article with another big thank you to the Ministry of Dice guys.  The timing of this article kind of sucked as they just announced a partnership with DZDungeon Studios who produced their own case which is up for sale on Etsy.  After chatting with True Mister Six and getting the Royal blessing, they were ok with this article coming out now.  As a thank you, I whipped up this…

This design is only for you guys if you want it (although I quite like the slim design of your case).  You know how to get a hold of me.

This was a fun project and makes travelling to and from the local store much easier.  What do you think?  Do you like the idea of keeping all of your game night needs in one place?  Have you come up with something similar?  Have you customized this case?  We would love to hear from you or add your designs to the gallery below.

As always, thank you for reading!

– jourdo

2 Replies to “Dice Masters Game Night Case”

  1. LOL 😂 “the royal blessing” 😂

    It’s a happy co-incidence for me – I think it’s great that there is ideas and choice for this sort of thing in our community. We’re all contributing to making it the best experience for all players.

    And isn’t it just wonderful, in this day & age, that we can do these things ourselves – it blows my mind.

    It’s a great product you’ve put together man, it looks great, I can’t wait to see what kind of custom jobs peeps do with it.

    Reply

    1. We are still just a little Colony over here. The Queen is on our money and everything!

      I agree that it is amazing that we are in a time where you can whip these up in your basement fairly easily.

      Anything to make playing this game better is good in my opinion.

      Reply

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