TL;DR

I’ve started a small utility for origami dice - origalea.

If you’re read some of my previous posts, you probably know that I’m fascinated by origami and automation. I’m also fond of board games, and recently discovered that I can produce origami dice by folding six squares of paper (you can a slightly bit more in Trying Cairo in Perl).

So it was just natural to arrive to origalea, whose name is a mix of origmi and alea (which is basic dice in Latin). You can move the a from one to the other if you will.

As it is now, it’s not a very user-friendly tool, although it’s not terribly difficult either. You will need a few tools, all of which are super-easy to get:

• teepee - which is yours truly tool for expanding templates that have some Perl code inside;
• cairosvg - which is only needed if you want PDF output (I guess you will want it for all practical purposes, but this is your call). It’s easy to get it if you have Docker, just take a look at previous post on graffer.

You can get the fatpacked version of teepee like this:

curl -LO https://github.com/polettix/teepee/raw/master/bundle/teepee
#   wget https://github.com/polettix/teepee/raw/master/bundle/teepee
chmod +x teepee
# sudo mv teepee /usr/local/bin

Uncomment the last line if you’re allowed to put stuff in /usr/local/bin, otherwise put it somewhere in your PATH.

Using origalea is pretty straightforward:

origalea --pdf -o file1.pdf a.png b.png c.png > die.pdf

Just pass image names (as PNG files) and you’re done. By the way, make sure that the images are already squared, because there’s no fancy adpatation.

If you’re wondering where you can get a lot of square images for your custom origami dice… you can head on to game-icons and find a lot of them.

After you have printed and cut each square, you can follow these instructions for folding and assemblying your die/dice.

Happy dicing!