Tag Archives: Board Games

The mighty walls of Carcassonne

For about the past decade, LEGO castle builders have trended towards what I like to call a ramshackle aesthetic, with precariously towering walls and gravity-defying roofs attached with a song and a prayer. It’s natural that builders would flex their chops in that manner, as that painterly style requires a great deal more skill than the simple, studs-up brick walls of classic castle sets and many early castle builders. However, equally difficult is building more traditional, real-world castles and avoiding the dreaded “grey wall syndrome” of thoroughly boring architecture. Isaac Snyder‘s walls of Carcassonne accomplishes this excellently, featuring a short segment of the French city’s fortifications. The walls and even roofs are no less detailed than any you’d find in the more ramshackle style, yet are thoroughly grounded in authentic style.

CCC XVI: Walls of Carcassonne

Perhaps next time Isaac can include a road though, as I’ve been needing a straight wall segment with a road to complete my city for ages!

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40198 LEGO Ludo Game (also known as Parcheesi or Sorry!) [Review]

Unlike building with LEGO, playing board games implies very specific elements of luck, strategy, and competition. It’s very hard to draw parallels between building with plastic pieces and spending hours over a board moving tokens back and forth. So when the two universes meet each other, the result can be absolutely unpredictable — just like 40198 LEGO Ludo Game, the new LEGO version of the famous Ludo board game. The set consists of 389 pieces, includes a small army of 16 minifigures and retails at $39.99/€39.99. And could I have imagined how much fun was hidden inside the box..?

Click to read the full review

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Heroica kicked up a notch

LEGO’s fantasy RPG-lite board game series Heroica may not have seen all much success with adult gamers or builders, but I’d be willing to bet if the boards had looked more like this upgraded version by Kale Frost, there would have been a great deal more interest. With some lovely sculpting, Kale has created an interactive map that retains the checkerboard movement squares for the players, while adding fun micro-builds for the various locations. For details, the scattered trans light blue cheese slopes in the water add a nice bit of motion to the seas, while the robot arms make great bridge railings.

Heroica Deluxe - Draida

Kale notes that he’s planning to expand the game board to make an even bigger playing area, so we can’t wait to see else is in store for these tiny adventurers!

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It takes only 6,500 pieces to build a perfect LEGO empire chess set

There are dozens of ways one can decorate their home with LEGO, either mounting Star Wars battleships on the walls, placing LEGO sculptures all over the place or even hanging huge LEGO mosaics in a guest room. Still, there is nothing quite like a brilliant grandmaster chess set built completely with LEGO pieces to be exhibited in your home library. Bonus points are for a themed chess set – just like this 6,500-piece-large masterpiece by Aniomylone.

Chess set

Click here to take a closer look at the pieces!

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LEGO Go board provides more possible outcomes than atoms in the universe

Despite spending the first fifteen years of my life in Japan and living in the same city as one of the largest Go clubs in North America, I’ve really only admired the ancient game of Go from afar. I’ll need to correct that someday, perhaps by building one of my own Go boards from LEGO, as Kadigan did. The 17×17 board takes advantage of the tiny gaps between LEGO tiles, with 1×1 round tiles as the black and white playing pieces. He’s even created realistic wooden bowls from ball turret bases.

Go (圍棋)

If you liked this, you might also appreciate the 9×9 LEGO Go board built by Joe Miller a couple years ago.

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LEGO Othello board

LEGO is a good medium for recreating board games, and over the years we’ve covered brick-built versions of everything from Clue, to Settlers of Catan, and everything in between. Not to mention a plethora of LEGO chess sets, both historical and themed. Now jtheels has recreated one of my personal favorites, Othello. Not only is the LEGO version completely playable and accurate in every detail, the builder has even used it to recreate the original game’s box art!

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Lincoln Logs, Connect 4, Speak and Spell, and other classic toys from your 80s childhood made in LEGO

I remember playing with some of these as a kid. We’ve featured jtheel‘s work before with their fantastic Simon Says; I think it’s high-time to kick the nostalgia factor up a bit and relive the best toys from the 80s. Or 70s. Maybe a bit of early 90s. At any rate, let’s take a trip down memory lane, shall we?

To start, an alternative classic building toy: Lincoln Logs.

LEGO Lincoln Logs 2

Click for more of your favorite childhood toys!

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LEGO vignettes from CLUE the board game

Bust out your detective notebooks because it’s time to find out who killed Mr. Boddy! The list of suspects is long and the combination of rooms and murder weapons seemingly endless. Leah G built seven fantastic little LEGO vignettes based on the classic board game of who done it known as Clue. Each vignette depicts a possible murder scenario and tons of great details.

Clue Board Game: The Body

Who do you think could be responsible for such a heinous crime? Could Tim Curry be invovled somehow? I need to snoop around a bit more for clues before I’ll feel confident opening that secret envelope. Leah has narrowed the list of possibilities down to a few of the usual suspects.

See all the possible villains after the jump

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A Board Game of High Kings

I’ve never heard of the ancient board game Ard Ri (more commonly known as Tafl or Hnefatafl), but this beautiful LEGO version built by Dan Harris and his girlfriend Dot makes me want to learn how to play. One of the oldest games in the world, Ard Ri (which means “High King” in Gaelic) was a Scottish variant of tafl played on a 9×9 board. Dan built the board structure and the stunning figurines that look like they were hand carved from ivory and wood. Dot built the incredible cheese slope mosaic which serves as the game’s board. I love the ship silhouettes and the intricate scrollwork and dragon head surrounding the king’s seat.

Ard Ri

The rules of the game are pretty straightforward. Using 8 soldiers to protect his king, the defending player must move the King from its starting place at the center of the board to one of the four corners. If the King reaches a corner, he escapes and wins the game. The opposing player, of course, must use his 16 soldiers to stop the King from escaping. All game pieces move horizontally or vertically through any number of unoccupied squares (like a Rook piece in chess) and pieces are captured by “sandwiching” an opposing player’s piece between two of your own. (I like to imagine that each of the victorious soldiers on either side of a captured piece grabs one of the captured soldier’s elbows and politely, but firmly, escorts him off of the board in the fashion of two mall security guards escorting an obnoxious teenager out of a store.) To capture the king, you must surround him on all four sides (two security guards per elbow). The game ends when the King either escapes or his captured.

Ard Ri

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Playable Go board built from LEGO

As a small child back in Japan, I used Go pieces to create serpentine roads across tatami floors for my little Tomica cars, but my family left Japan before I ever played a proper game. I still get nostalgic whenever I see Go games. Joe Miller built this fully functional 9×9 Go set completely from LEGO, using some rather complicated techniques to place the black lines on the board.

9x9 Go Board

The lines themselves are the tops of 1×2 half-panels wedged into full (3-brick high) panels, combined with some serious sideways and upside-down (SNOT) construction.

9x9 Go Board Construction

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Colonel Mustard in the study with the candlestick

Ian Spacek seems to be on a roll in the ongoing 2014 MOCOlympics contest. In a round focused on board games, he chose to recreate Clue, a classic family game that has been around since the 40’s.

I love the way Ian has captured all the woody tones of the original board, as well as packing the build with many beautiful details such as the floor patterns, furniture and props. Check out MOCPages for loads of close-up photos and a chance to compare Ian’s interpretation with the original.

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Lego Clue vignettes

Max Pointner recreated the classic scenarios from the board game Clue where players try to figure out the killer, the weapon, and the room of the murder scene. I like the black frames on each vignette that tie the series together. If you enjoyed these vignettes, check out more dramatized scenes of Clue by Alex Eylar.

Professor Plum, In the Conservatory, With the WrenchMrs. White, In the Kitchen, With the Lead PipeMrs. Peacock, In the Library, With the Rope

Miss Scarlett, In the Ballroom, With the CandlestickMr. Green, In the Study, With the RevolverColonel Mustard, In the Billiard Room, With the Knife

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