Yahtzee Dice Tower

One of my favorite games, largely due to its simplicity, has always been Yahtzee. When originally thinking about the assignment I was away from my computer and unable to create any CAD. Instead I started thinking about the properties of the materials we were offered to use. When thinking about cast acrylic, I thought about its ability to be written on. I thought that I could use this quality to make a permanent scorecard. Scorecards are an important part of Yahtzee that are thrown out after every game. Rather than using a new sheet every time I thought of including the score sheet on my tower.

I brought my CAD to the laser cutter to create my first iteration of my model. Initially I used white acrylic, which was a mistake. Another mistake I made when using the engraving feature of the laser cutter was not peeling off the brown paper on the outside of the acrylic. Since I did not peel the paper off, the laser only cut into the paper but not the acrylic itself. When I engraved again, this time having pulled off the paper, the engraving did not stand out very much due to the acrylic being white. I decided to switch to clear acrylic, this also allowed the user to see the dice bounce of the angled pieces. In order to do all of these engravings I took a jpeg file of the Yahtzee scorecard from the internet and inputted it into the illustrator file to be combined with my DXF files of my parts. After my first prototype I decided an addition of a marker holder would be useful. To accomplish this I cut three new tabbed pieces and edited my base to account for where these would stand. In order to make sure the scorecard was visible I placed a black sheet of acrylic underneath so that the engraving was easier to see.