LEGO Techniques - LEGO Dice

Roll them bones!  Probably one of the greatest things to come out of the new generation of LEGO Games has been the dice.  They seem to sell for a pretty low price but they are master studs out pieces if you can manage them.  The dice have two parts to them.  One is the ABS mold injected red (or pearl gold) bit.  The other is the rubber injected flange bit that allows the dice to bounce around your table like a ping pong ball.  The rubber flange is fairly easy to separate from the surface of the die but requires a bit more finesse to remove it in one piece.  At some point I finally gave up and cut out the center of one of the rubber sides.  Only then did I realize that there is a hollow inside the plastic part that allows the rubber to flow through and grip tenaciously.

But with or without the flange you an use the die for creating a whole ton of SNOT.  The only drawback is that the distance between studs is 5.5 plates.  This can be made a few different ways.  A 2x plate is the same width as 5 plates tall.  You could attach either one to a bracket or other element with a half plate portion.  Or you could use a travis brick (2.5 plates wide) with three plates (or a brick) to take up the rest.  You would have to choose whether to put 3 plates on one side or 2 on one side and 1 on the other.  In this case I've got studs to the outside with a half plate gap between them.

Or you could build out the die with a plate on opposite sides.  You would then have 7.5 plates in width which is exactly the same length as a 3x element.  The problem then becomes a 1/4 plate gap due to the size of the opposing plates.  (5.5 plates minus 5 plates for a 2x element leaves a 1/2 plate width to be split evenly).  One form of a perfect connection would be to place 2x2 plates on every face and then 3x3 plates over that.  Every 3x3 will show only the edge of the plate and no more.

Imagine these are 3x3 plates...

Or you can throw caution to the wind and let the gaps add up, eventually resolving it somewhere.

You can see that little hole in the middle that helps the rubber flange to grip the die so well.  You can start a Technic axle down the hole but it won't go past the stop.  Even a 3.2mm bar won't slip through there.  It's about 1.6mm thick so it's not grippable by a clip either.  It's mostly just in the way.

With Novvember coming up soon I think I might try my hand at using this piece to build some sort of LEGO Games based Nnenn-ship.