If you have never come across it, let me recommend Blokus as a family game for all ages. We have introduced lots of people to it, all of whom have bought it for themselves.
There are just two catches:
It really needs just four players. Exactly four,
And
If you're playing with toddlers and the smallest piece gets lost, it becomes impossible to play fairly.
You can guess how we learned the second point.
I'll come back to this.
August turned out to be an odd month. I don't think my reaction to finishing the book was what I expected. Instead of feeling relieved and taking a break or excited to start something new, I just felt terribly deflated and dissatisfied. Why that is the case is complicated, but I do feel the black dog yapping at my heels.
But in the real world, having introduced the boys to pond yachts, I introduced the twins to model railways.
I had a Hex Track module lying around, and after an incredibly basic attempt at landscaping, using the included plaster bandage and the offcuts from the wood, I handed it to the girls to paint.
I think we all learned valuable lessons.
Not least, how much I adore the twins.
The odd thing is that, after they went home, I began to see an emergent landscape.
I wish I'd had some of this thinking in mind to start with
So there will be a road, with a narrow-gauge connection, and an abandoned "mainline" running alongside the standard-gauge line. I happened to have some suitable track and tippers left over after planning the lime kilns on the N gauge layout.
I want to add some figures and animals to the scene to add scale, but that is proving quite difficult to source quickly. Never mind trying to find N gauge unicorns...
The black bit in front of the track will end up as a small drainage ditch, which is something inconsequential but important that I've been wanting to model for a long time.
To return to Blokus, I think I've been identifying what those missing smallest pieces are.
- A simple corrugated iron shelter in N gauge is still something I struggle to make. I don't have an N gauge equivelant of the clear Wills sheet that made Apa work. Every option has a compromise that looks dreadful to me, and then I need to maintain the CI over much bigger models.
-Stonework and bridge abutments. A bit of me knows how I could model these in 2mm, but a voice keeps telling me I can't.
- Relative size. I really struggle with this, How can a tree that looks too small in 4mm look stupidly overscale in 4mm?
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