Chinese character Aluminum Dice

I've been playing a lot of board games with friends and wanted to make some aluminim dice as gifts, but wanted something that could also be a talking point.

I thought up a few ideas including replacing the pips with polygons of variable sides (a pentagon for 5, hexagon for 6, etc), but decided this time to make chinese character dice.

The dice are 16mm cubes with a 2x45° chamfer all around.

I milled everything on a manual TRAK K3 Knee Mill out of 20mm aluminim square bar stock.

Finish is sandblasted and then engraved on a CO2 laser cutter using CerMark spray.

A quick acrylic fixture was made to help me repeatedly locate my engravings each time I flipped the dice to engrave a new face.

I do like how these dice feel in hand, so I'll probably make more in the future with other pip designs like the polygon idea.