Anyone who plays board games at a table knows the annoyance of dice bouncing off the edge and vanishing under the sofa. That is exactly the problem this set of builds tackles: three original towers, made by hand, that catch every roll in an attached tray and spare the household repeated trips to hunt for dropped dice. Better still, they get genuine use, since the maker's family plays games often.
Each one takes a different approach. The hexagonal tower is birch plywood with pine dowels arranged vertically around a central spiral ramp that feeds into its tray, and it was sized to sit fully inside a custom Catan game box. The darker rectangular one is red oak over pine dowels plus bamboo skewers for the thinner bars, built in two tiers around an internal spiral, with a black felt lining in the tray. The lighter third tower uses red oak with bamboo dowels set in alternating angled rows as baffles above a wooden catch basin.
What stands out to me is that no plans existed; the designs were improvised as the work progressed, using wood already on hand. Bamboo skewers as a cheap source of very thin dowels seems like a clever substitution. The drilling story is a real one too: a 2.5-inch forstner bit going 5.5 inches deep into oak, which the maker reports was slow going, oak being unforgiving to work.
The results look solid. Dice up to about 15-16mm rolled fine from D6 through D20 in testing, and dice in the clips tumble down the internal steps and land cleanly in the trays. Two points stay open: no D4 was ever tried, and while the towers proved tougher than some expected, a hard throw could still do damage. One detail worth noting is that the steps must reach the edge, or dice can get stuck or skip a section, a constraint that clearly shaped these builds.