Mordheim

I’ve added 6 more windows to the other side of my Mordheim Dice Tower Building! The window on the very top of the tower is cut all the way through the wall, so you can see through it.

I haven’t glued anything into place yet, I want to paint black behind the gratings before I totally secure them to the window and add a frame.

You can see the lines where I measured this time. I am using a smudge over 5cm for each story, and the window is a little up from being right in the middle of the story.

You can also see a couple trash cans in this picture. I’ve been experimenting with them, and I should have a tutorial on them soon.

Enjoy,
Ashton Sanders

I’ve done a bunch more detailing on my Mordheim dice tower:

I’ve added the wooden baseboard and three corners around the outside of the building. I have also framed one of the windows. I have used Popsicle sticks for almost all of the wooden sections of this Mordheim Building. I have also used a couple stirring sticks. Some of the thin wood (like 3 sides of the window) was created by cutting a very tiny sliver from a Popsicle stick, and turning it sideways.

Here’s the front door:

Here’s the framed window. I forgot that I will need to remove the grating to add the black base paint behind the grating, so I will just have to do my best on this window to cover all of the white foam bubbles with black paint:

More to come:
-Ashton Sanders

While I was at a Montana-style estate auction (in someone’s backyard) I accidentally bought a bucket of crap for $2.00 when I thought I was only buying a T-square. Instead of throwing away the bucket, I brought it home and searched through it. This bucket was full of the most random construction stuff. It had some weird foam tubing, bolts, tails, etc., etc. It also had probably 100 of these small white vent-type plastic parts about 7 inches long and 3 inches wide. I have no idea what they are for exactly but I knew they could definitely come in handy for my Mordheim Buildings. I just hadn’t figured out what I could use them for… until now!

MORDHEIM WINDOWS!

This picture shows the plastic vent with one edge cut off and sliced into nice window sized pieces, and the other side of the plastic vent left in place. They end up being kind of thick borders, but I think after painting, it will look perfect. Here’s a progress shot I took while cutting a hole for this window. It was really quite simple; I just marked the hole, and cut it out with a razor blade, leaving a small ledge around the edged to keep the window grating from sinking too far into the wall.

My next step will be adding a window frame around the window.
-Ashton Sanders

Here’s a video of my Mordheim Dice Tower (WIP) in Action. You won’t be able to see the dice once I put the roof on, so here you go:

Enjoy,
-Ashton Sanders

As you may have noticed, my dice tower (and most of my buildings so far) are constructed mostly of packing foam (Styrofoam). As you can see in this picture, the foam bubbles and small holes in Styrofoam is not really a desired look for model building, so I have gone on a quest to find the best way to hide the Styrofoam texture. Here’s a picture of my Dice Tower Wall after I painted the Styrofoam, and before I filled in the Styrofoam holes:

Click on any of these image for an even larger view.

If you put 3-5 coats of acrylic paint on Styrofoam, it will eventually cover up these holes. Another tactic I’ve used is to spread Elmer’s Glue or PVA Glue (White Glue) over the surface of your building. Or you can mix in the previously mentioned white glue into the paint before painting the Styrofoam or foam. All of these create a very smooth and flat surface on your foam, which is nice but not realistic.

I happened to have a small tub of “light-weight” Spackle hanging out in my closet, so I spread it over the surface of my building. In this next picture you can see how the Spackle automatically filled in the Foam holes, surrounded the Styrofoam bubbles and filled in the cracks. I accidentally painted this building black before putting on the Spackle, but in the end has helped a lot for these pictures.

This next picture shows the thin layer of Spackle I spread on this foam dice tower building. I tried my best to thin out the Spackle and create a nice, smooth surface over the foam. In retrospect, I would definitely recommend a thicker layer of Spackle. The extra Spackle will add more texture to your building and cover the foam better.

As you can see in this final picture, the layer of Spackle is too thin and shows some of the foam bumbles. I’ll be adding another layer of Spackle for texture and to cover the Styrofoam bubbles.

I’ll be putting together a Tutorial for Covering Styrofoam and Foam in the next couple days!

-Ashton

Finally I have found someone in Montana interested in playing Mordheim!

My neighbors came over for dinner yesterday, and they brought their son. He brought over his Pokemon cards, and we “battled” with an extremely simplified, home-made set of rules. I took out one Orc Warrior and a Rat, and faced them in front of each other and told him the basic rules. I explained the game as we went, and told him what he need to roll each time.

To say the least, he fell in love. We did combat mini-games with Mordheim rules (starting 8 inches apart) 5-6 times.

We used my Mordheim Dice Tower the entire night, and since we were just playing on my work bench, it ended up being the most useful thing of the night. We only rarely had to find dropped dice (if we missed the entrance), and we didn’t have to get a huge space to roll. It also doubled as testing for my dice tower. I found one little bug where a dice could get stuck 1 in a 1000 rolls. But hey, at least I know before I’ve added the roof!

So maybe one of these days, I’ll actually play the game of Mordheim =) *knocks on wood*
-Ashton Sanders

The next step in my unorganized shamble of a plan, was to paint all of the ramps black along with the inside of the building. That way I won’t have a lot of trouble painting the inside after I glue it all together. Unfortunately, I mixed up way too much paint (I was mixing water with black to insure the black paint go into the crevices.) So instead of wasting the perfectly good, watered-down black paint, I painted as much as I could, and glued it together all at the same time.

I also glued my now black dice tower to a section of thick card I got from the back of a picture frame. This “base” will act to hold the dice catcher in place, connected to the dice tower. Here’s a picture:

Here’s a close up picture of the Dice Catcher in progress:

Next I will conquer the “Styrofoam Texture” on the side of my Dice Tower!

Stay Tooned,
-Ashton Sanders

I’ve run into some trouble with dice “sticking” in the dice tower. This only really occurs when I roll a lot of dice at once (like 7+), and fortunately for me, Mordheim doesn’t usually require that many dice being rolled at a time. Even when that many dice are rolled, it only gets stuck 1-3% of the time. I’ve tried everything I could think of to handle the problem so I’ve accepted that it will happen sometimes. I’m okay with that.

Here’s the pictures of the new tower:

I played a good game of Star Wars Risk using the dice tower, and it didn’t go to favorably for me. I rolled about 20 battles through the dice tower and lost 17 of them. Hopefully it will be happier once I’m done putting it together. =)

-Ashton Sanders

I’ve been working a lot on my Mordheim dice tower. Here’s some pictures of the progress:

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As requested by TRoss on my last post, here’s my definition of a dice tower:

A dice tower is a tower that you throw dice into the top, it gets bounced around inside, and then is spit out the bottom into a contained area. This keeps the dice in a contained area, so dice aren’t flying across the table, hitting models, or getting lost. This also prevents dice from landing askew on random sections of your board. This is especially useful for games like Risk where you don’t have a lot of space to roll the dice and you usually end up hitting and disrupting the game with your dice.

Here’s some links to some example dice towers I came across:

Here is a generic dice tower:

Here is a Great example of a Dice Tower that doubles as terrain:

Click for Details

So I’m going to try to create a dice tower that looks like a normal building, and try to hide the fact that it’s a dice tower =) We’ll see how it goes.

-Ashton