Roll for Soda

I have many different flavorings that I like to add to sparkling water. With over 30 options not including combo flavors, it's hard to choose which one I want. I decided to come up with a way to randomize my soda. I could use an app or smart speaker, pick slips out of a hat, plan a rotation, use a spinner, or roll dice. I decided to use dice.

Since I have so many flavors, a standard die (d6) would not work, so I shopped for a d20. I could have gotten a multipack of d20s, but a set was a better value. I got a basic set at a local comic and game store, but they also have other colors and fancier options available.

After visiting my relatives who play D&D and other games, I built a dice tower. I cut the sides on a table saw and cut the slats with a utility knife. I hot glued the slats and used wood glue for the rest.  

Building a dice tower (insides)

This system works great and is a lot of fun. After I started, I used up some flavors and added several more. The d20 isn't quite enough for all the single unsweetened flavors, so I added coin flips which are technically a d2. I also added more coin flips to choose between different brands or similar flavors like apple and green apple. A rather unlikely flavor is Loran strawberry lemonade. First, I would have to roll d20 (18 for sweet), then roll d4 (3 for lemon/limeade), roll d20 again to select the type of lemonade (19 for berry), flip a coin (heads for strawberry), flip a coin (tails for Loran). This works out to a one in 6400 chance of getting that exact flavor. 

I made a spreadsheet to show all the choices and whether an additional dice roll or coin flip is required. It's almost like a decision tree. It's color-coded with cyan for homemade extracts with store-bought ingredients, magenta for homemade extracts with homegrown ingredients, yellow for the coin flip section, green and purple for sweet and combo, and then brown for bourbon-based extracts. There's a few things I need to fix, like strawberry kiwi wasn't supposed to be blue, and the strawberry in the berry section was supposed to have a coin flip. I wrote in some corrections but haven't re-printed it yet.

I had fun choosing emojis to represent as many flavors as I could. I know some fruit emojis have other meanings, but I am using them to literally represent fruit. I made the spreadsheet with google sheets, which means I can edit it from my phone or my laptop. That's very convenient, but I discovered that my laptop doesn't have as many emoji choices as my phone, so it won't look the same if I print it from my laptop. I tried to print directly from my phone to the color printer. It's difficult to set up and has to be set up again the next time. The easiest solution turned out to be print to pdf and then email it to print from my laptop.