More Fast Cheap Terrain-from-Toys... "Wooden Block Cityscape"

 It's holidays. Mum is sick, so the kids and I camp out in the hobby shed, leaving her in peace.

Dad is cleaning, the kids are ferreting around in boxes messing stuff up discovering old toys, some of which I offer to 'spruce up.' So I get distracted too!

Here is a cityscape I made out of a box of blocks. We are going to use it for mecha, as my 7-year-old and I are enjoying playing Mechwarrior Online together. (I may do a post on this PC game, as I think there is a fair Venn diagram overlap between wargamers/old dads with bad reflexes/tinkerers/mecha nerds...)

 

This was maybe an hour with the spraypaint. I reckon Bunnings should sponsor me...

 

 

The original blocks...

 

A few more shots of the board in use...

 

You could see it would be easy enough to dab on windows with black paint...

Cheap and nasty, but it does the job. All it cost was $3 of grey spray paint, and hour of my time... ...and having to store a box of toys in my shed...

 

As my son and I have also been playing War Thunder together, we have bought from $1 Hot Wheels tanks to play a simple tank game I will invent. I'm going to see if the board will work in larger scales.

The kids tend to hand over stuff fast if I ask if they want me to 'do something with it.' I've even started to get requests! My daughter brought in her Hogwarts set and asked if I could help her "make it more real-looking.' I'll do before and after shots once we finish.

 

You can see a few toys in the early stages of being worked on... They don't necessarily use them for minis - they just want them to look less 'kiddy'

 

The city board was just the reverse of my son's "Ant Wars" MDF sheet - from what I can determine, his "Ant Wars" game bears a suspicious resemblance to Risk with a lot of cinematic creativity thrown in...

The "Ant Wars" side of the cityscape board. You can see I have been waging IRL 'ant wars' in my backyard between painting and cleaning!

 

Something I have noticed with my kids (age 7 and 9) is they like dice rolling but dislike measuring. They also tend to have a grasp of 'odds' -. when they make up their own games they tend to do 4+ on d6 to succeed, but may change it to 3+ if it's 'easier' or 5+ if it's 'harder' or '6' if it's 'really really hard' - which they tend to do organically by just eyeballing the situation. They also like 'saving throws' or 'extra chances' for favourite minis (heroes?). Might be food for a game design post...