How to Make Dice - Dining Table Print and Play

this is dining-table printing plate and today we're going to talk about making custom dice many prints and play games require dice with custom faces and this might just be for theme but it might also be because the game needs something other than a 1/6 chance beat result you could print out a reference chart and all the standard die but then you have to spend part of your game looking things up so it's much nicer if you can create a custom die with the faces you need and today we're going to talk about several different ways you can do just that not be the easiest way to make custom bias is actually just to take blank dice and draw them on with a permanent marker you can find blank cubes which are essentially black dice in a number of games that you might be able to easily find second hand and you can also buy them from specialist ice retailers you may be able to find cubes like this from teacher supply stores furniture and of course any cube will more or less function as a diet doesn't have to have nice rounded edges if you simply draw on the faces of permanent markers you can use a variety of different colors so now you have your dye which rolls perfectly well just like any other because it is essentially just a regular die and because it's permanent marker the faces are pretty durable the extra bonus trick here is that if you take a white board marker and just scribble over some permanent marker on a glossy surface like this then you can wipe away the permanent marker you might eat it a few times but it essentially lifts the ink off the surface if there's still some color left there then you can give it a quick spray of some alcohol such as white board cleaner and it will help clean it off a lot quicker we are left with a tube even if there's some hints of color left on it that you can reuse for another game in the future if you only spare - you have a regular six sided dice then you can make some felonies some custom buy it's just my printing out and sticking paper loops around them for this obviously you'll need to either customize and then print out your templates or print generic templates and draw on them with a pen or pencil before assembling them there'll be a link in the description of the video for some templates that you can use this method for this method will print out our customized template on regular printer paper and here I've trimmed it down to just the bits that we need this will essentially make two strips for two loops one one way come on the other way around the die the templates are specific to specific sizes of die so be sure to download the one you actually need for the dice they are using you could if you wanted to pre score all of these lines with a scoring wheel on a rotary cutter you could draw on the banks with a ballpoint pen but to be honest precision isn't massively important for this method so I'm just going to fold and score by hand now we need to cut out the separate strips I mean it's true all of the crop marks here and these are the bits that we need to keep so now we need some method of attaching them and for this I'm just going to use double sided tape because it's quick and simple you could use glue you could use regular tape and tape over the outside the specific method doesn't massively matter so first of all we take the strip that only has to die faces on I'm going to prepare a little bit of the double sided tape just take on this end this gray section here is going to leave it that we won't see at all because it's going to get glued over so I've put my double sided tape on there in advance and now I simply wrap it around the die and at this point it doesn't really matter which particular size here after all we need to snug it fairly tight and just drop that over the top and then we should need to trim off this tab you can either place it on a table and run and lift them on there like so or in most cases you can simply take a pair of scissors and trim it off like that the only important thing is just that it's not sticking a long way out to easily catch then we do exactly the same with the other strip of paper and again I'm just fixing a bit of double-sided tape from there in advance this time we start off by wrapping the paper over the the two blank faces about in a strip and if you can find the face which actually has d doubling up which on this case is this side face start your other strip on the opposite side because you know if you are worried about the ever so slight imbalance this will balance it out properly and again wrap the paper all the way around drop that last one over the Tomlin's is nice and snug if there's any overlap there trim it off in this case it's fine and there you have a die which has your six custom face is again because it actually does have a real die inside that weight will keep its structure it will allow it to roll fairly decently if you do have any concerns about the edges or the corners here providing a little bit of bias you can put the guy in the high of your hand and roll it around with your other hand and this will just bend over all of those corners a little bit and snug get closer to the diet itself this is fairly easy to undo if you don't want this die anymore you can just slide these off and you could potentially even just keep them like that flattened in a game box and use the same generic six-sided dice for multiple names what if you don't have any spare lights at all not even regular d6 well in that case if you don't mind putting the effort in you can make some pretty decent ice entirely out of paper these are commonly known as origami dice they've been around for a while and I'll link to a few different places you can see more information in the description the video for these you will need quite a lot of folding you don't need to be massively precise you'll print out a template on regular printer paper you really do need to not go any heavier than regular print to pay for this if you fold cardstock over multiple times it will become very very difficult to slot together and start with we will simply cut the six different faces out the individual squares along the solid black lines and again I've customized these before printing out but you could just as easily print out the blank template and draw these symbols on yourself if you prefer precision is not massively important here the only thing that really matters is that your folds are in the right place so cutting them out don't worry none of these edges will end up being seen in the final die anyway so quite a lot of the instructions are printed on here we've got the order of all the folds we need to make so first of all we need to fold back along these lines which are label number one and these are folded back away from the printed die face nearly all of the folds are when you both of those number one folds next we do the same thing falling back the ones marked with a number two and again there's one two of these and you might want to note on the backside we're folding these down to meet the crease from the first folds we made fold and crease and then unfold these four now so if we flip this over for the third step take each of these diagonal folds the number two ones one at a time and then fold them back along this number one line at the top and you want to fold this top edge in so again if you're looking at it you fold this edge along the diagonal fold that we made before pulled down again along the number one fold and you want to essentially form a creasing on this number three line here so that goes down this comes across and it forms a crease along there how long the number three - you'll need to unfold the first one of these before rotating it around 180 degrees and doing the other one in exactly the same manner so again we folded the diagonal across we fall back down along the first crease we made flatten a little top here and we want to bring it to a crease along this extra dash line for number three once you've made both of those folds you need to kind of fold them both in at the same time and this is a little bit tricky because this corner here goes right the way into this corner here formed by these folds and this corner here goes right the way into that corner formed by these folds so we need to kind of fold them both down at the same time moving past each other I'll do that again for you fold them both down at the same time moving past each other and push them right the way down into that corner at the bottom there and then you should be able to flatten it down to form this shape make sure that everything is as flat and as tight together as you can get it it should look something like this on the back and then we just need to fold around these number four folds up in the corners around the back to form a point and again both ends fold it over the back to form our point and that's what you'll see on the other side this is our printed my face lastly we take our number five fold here and this is the onion that we fold back onto itself and we just pull these two pointy ends back away from the printed face so we're folding like that away from the printed face crease them down and you have a single printed face with these two triangular legs sticking out of it and then we just need to do that five more times now we have all six of these assembled we need to start putting the slides of the diet together obviously the first thing to bear in mind here is if there is if it is important which particular faces go opposite which other faces make sure you've sorted that out in advance you end up with these faces that have these little triangular legs and on the other sides they have these little pockets and the pockets quints let me also triangular so you can slide the leg of one side into the pocket of another and you won't get them completely snug together because obviously there's space for the paper to fold in there and you'll probably not manage to make it completely accurately something I haven't so don't worry if there's slight gaps there always will be the first two are easy the third one is a little bit tricky because you need to swap one face in there and another face in the side of the same pace at the same time for these situations it's best to leave them somewhat loose on both sides like so and just slowly work them in remember the pocket here on the inside is also a triangle so you need to wobble it along in that axis you can't push them that way and just say slowly jiggle the two sides next to each other until you've formed the third face of your die these little tiny holes at the corner here are quite common don't worry about it the fourth side is the same challenge as the third row you can flex these slightly in order to make them curve around and and into those pockets I try not to push too much because you'll just end up bending everything and rounding off the currently relatively flat sides by the time you get to the fifth and sixth sides it gets considerably trickier for the fifth side we're going to have to be trying to slot in one two and also three of these legs in two pockets at the same time which is not that easy in general you want to start at one side of the face so we'll start with this leg here and then work your way around clockwise or anticlockwise doesn't matter doing one sides leg at a time in order get them to this point where they're all a little bit in and then just sort of slowly work it closer and closer together this one's the problematic one here and you may find it helps to get a pen or something similar and just sort of pull that out to a bit of a curve in order to help it slide in however you don't do this fifth slide all the way in until you have started to assemble the sixth sight as well because now you've got four of these legs to get in at the same time and this is by far the trickiest part of the whole operation you may find it pop it helps to pre round these legs a little bit just curve them inwards so that you find it easier to actually slide them into the pockets and then again we'll start with just one and work our way clockwise or anti-clockwise around the outside of that face for attaching and then you end up with this monstrosity and you just need to slowly work it all together at this point you may find that it helps to pinch individual pairs of faces together one at a time once you get close you may also find that it helps to roll the die in the ball of your hand because that works each face in roughly the right direction all at the same time you're hoping your of it eventually will get close to a cube do this it is possible to a very neat origami dice like this it's also possible to end up with a bit of a mess but realistically you will still end up with something that rolls pretty decently considering you just made out of paper because each of the sides has the same shape and the same parts and is slotted together in the same way it's relatively fair obviously the neater and then what I do you make it the more fair it will be the more completely random and the less likely or beter just favor one side or another very broadly speaking one of the ways that makes the nicest custom bias is simply a few stickers and sticking to the side of a regular diet and the easiest way through this is by using a special indented diet which is simply a blank diet that has slightly indented faces and there's a essentially a raised border around the outside of the diner self which allows you to place a sticker and have the edges of that sticker protected slightly from being picked up at the edge by it rough handling obviously if you wanted to apply these stickers to a of regular dye that will also work obviously you need to be careful that your sticker doesn't overlap too far to the edge because if it does hang off the edge it's going to be much easier to pick the off Meyer rough handling and some dice such as this one if you see that have actually a round face because they've been rounded over at all corners in which case you either need to punch out a round circular sticker for the face of this die will make a much smaller sticker to make sure that it's not easy to lift it up at these corners you can also get various different kinds of invented dice here's different colors of the regular square ones these are quite nice they're they're larger than usual so if you compare these two other sizes of die they're notably larger but they have round faces on so you can use a round craft punch to punch out your round stickers and stick those into the round indentation and I'm not gonna be protected but also very attractive for this method we will have to cut out individual stickers for each of the faces of our die using stickers from the same game as before Tony goes deep-space d6 and I printed off four dice worth here but I don't need that many first of all we just cut out the individual stickers for the faces of the die and when you're cutting things like this out is actually advantageous to stop either side of the don't just slice all the way through the paper because then you can keep these crop marks lined up but when you need to cut in the other direction when you are making stickers for dice as I have done here is a good idea to laminate them because like that the face is protected dice are one of those components you're going to be handling in your hands quite a lot so if there's any grease or sweat or anything on people's fingers then you don't want that rubbing off onto your dye faces and making it look all grubby so here we have one dye is worth of phases and each of these phases is slightly smaller than the indentation on my indented diet I'm actually going to use the knife again to pick up the corners of the backing paper here as we have done with sticks before peel half the backing away so that the the glue is exposed on the half of the sticker position it dab it down on the glue side and then in this case we can use the knife to just retrieve the backing paper out from the back there and stick it down there we have one face of our custom die which needs to do that another five times and there we have through the nicest feeling custom dice that's going to come out of this video all of our faces are nicely printed stuck to the outside of a oh good weighty fair die it rolls well and rubbing over the top there you don't actually get at the edges of the sticker so it remains undamaged okay so there you go there's several different ways of making printing plate game dice ranging from entirely out of paper the the cheat and easy method to pretty nice pretty solid and lasting dice he opens up late games there are a couple of other options still and if you want to match the the quality of commercial games that have custom dice we're talking about things like king of Tokyo Elvis I'm the quarry are serious things like that which have engraved dice where the the design is actually sunken into the surface of the die itself and filled with paint that is an entirely different question it is possible to do it at home but it involves a special more specialist equipment and it's harder to get right in the future I will do a video on using a cheaper laser engraver which you can buy pretty inexpensively over the Internet to engrave the faces of a plastic die such as this it is possible to use the end of a dremel tool using a burr to cut away the face of the diet but that obviously involves a steady eye and fine motor control so it's it's not something you can easily do without a little bit of practice first these items these things will be covered in an upcoming video but this is the basics of die making for your printer play games have fun and good luck with your employers

Channel: Dining Table Print & Play

Views: 37,790

Keywords: pnp, print and play, print & play, board games, boardgames, make, craft, how to

Id: Xu8Egcqxpk8

Length: 23min 52sec (1432 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 10 2017