Dice Towers
Posted: Thu Jul 22, 2021
So.... about 24 years ago when I was 23 years young I started playing a new game on the internet. It was the very first MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) game to be released. Its name was Ultima Online.... and it was a pretty big part of my life back then. Over the course of the first year of playing I met up with 3 other guys who would become lifelong friends. We all shared a love of gaming - and were all just starting out in careers that would take us halfway around the world from each other. Nevertheless we remain the best of friends - and we still game together twice a week.
For years now we have spent a good portion of our gaming time in the "we should... " and "wouldn't it be cool if we... " game. Well... during the first year of covid, we bit the bullet and decided to finally go in to business creating tabletop gaming accessories. Vulcan Forge LLC was started up around September 2020, and Frostfire Forge Creations (my factory) was started 2 months later. Our goal is to create the best, most beautifully designed gaming accessories in the world. And while we have not made it quite to that point yet, mostly due to my being an absolute noob at this whole manufacturing thing, we have had some small successes so far and have huge plans for the future.
We started out making towers out of 100% acrylic, with some engraving on either the inner or outer layer as appropriate for the design. The results are in; game stores love them. The downside... they take WAY too long to create with a single laser, even a huge one, and 2 staff (which is what our budget allowed - and the most I can support with a single laser). Here are those towers, and the carrying vault we call "The Cube":
They are great... and sell really well, but with them taking so long to manufacture we needed a "bread and butter" type product that is fast to cut, fast to assemble and that we could punch out by the thousands... so we designed some mostly wooden towers with acrylic insides, using 100% cut pieces (no engraving), so that we could produce hundreds of them per day (~150 per day or so). Will post those pics in the next message, since I hit some sort of limit
For years now we have spent a good portion of our gaming time in the "we should... " and "wouldn't it be cool if we... " game. Well... during the first year of covid, we bit the bullet and decided to finally go in to business creating tabletop gaming accessories. Vulcan Forge LLC was started up around September 2020, and Frostfire Forge Creations (my factory) was started 2 months later. Our goal is to create the best, most beautifully designed gaming accessories in the world. And while we have not made it quite to that point yet, mostly due to my being an absolute noob at this whole manufacturing thing, we have had some small successes so far and have huge plans for the future.
We started out making towers out of 100% acrylic, with some engraving on either the inner or outer layer as appropriate for the design. The results are in; game stores love them. The downside... they take WAY too long to create with a single laser, even a huge one, and 2 staff (which is what our budget allowed - and the most I can support with a single laser). Here are those towers, and the carrying vault we call "The Cube":
They are great... and sell really well, but with them taking so long to manufacture we needed a "bread and butter" type product that is fast to cut, fast to assemble and that we could punch out by the thousands... so we designed some mostly wooden towers with acrylic insides, using 100% cut pieces (no engraving), so that we could produce hundreds of them per day (~150 per day or so). Will post those pics in the next message, since I hit some sort of limit