Settling the Settlers - The People of Catan

So remember way back to my post about sheep and the HO scale? If not, there's an entire miniature collection that's called the HO scale. (Hilarious, I know!) It's popular amongst the model train crowd. So in addition to my HO sheep, I wanted to add some people to take care of the sheep, and participate in various other resource related activities. So I went and bought some HO people...and now they are settling Catan. Since I made my model resources for the blog first, I was able to incorporate the people into some of the other hexes. You may recall me mentioning that they have HO people in some R rated situations.  I haven't added those...yet.  I'm really tempted.  I think it would be a good laugh every time I laid the board out. Get it?  Laid?  Hahaha...I really shouldn't use this blog as a forum for my terrible sense of humour.

Anyways, here are some of the other resources with the HO people. These are all the Preiser figurines, but I think the naughty ones are Noch.


Lumberjack HO figurine on the lumber/wood resource

   



Moving bricks around on the brick resource



Harvesting the wheat on the grain resource

 



Shepherd watching over his flock on the wool/sheep resource




Harvesting ore from the ore resource




The Forest/Lumber Resource aka "Wood"

Trees for the Forest Resource

This resource is actually the one I had a pretty good idea of in my head all along.  Once I found tiny evergreen trees at a miniature dollhouse store, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. The trees were good, but I realised that the hex was supposed to produce a resource, so I thought I should find some lumber or logs for it as well.  The gentleman at the model train store was helpful at pointing out a milled lumber yard, but it seemed a little too advanced for the Settlers to have.  Upon advising him I was looking for un-milled lumber, he told me he went and cut down some dead sticks that had fallen in the forest behind his house for his model train set. 



Dead sticks for the Lumber



Well, I don't have a forest by my house, but I did find some sticks while walking my dog. Now, despite my dog's affinity for tracking down sticks, dogs aren't a requirement to finding a good stick you can use for lumber. Apparently the most important thing to know is that it actually has to be a dead stick.  If you snap it off a live tree there's problems with drying/shrinking or something along those lines (according to the man at the model train store). I eyeballed what I thought would be a good scale for my hex, and sawed several pieces approximately the same size. I then piled them into groups of three, stacking them on top of each other. I hot glued them into this formation, then soaked the final piece in my white glue/podgy concoction to seal everything in.

While placing the pieces on the hex, it seemed unbalanced.  So I decided to throw a river in there to round out the hex.  I used the same hot glue on wax paper strategy I used for the sheep ponds.  Except this time, instead of using paint, I used permanent marker.  It dried much faster, was WAY less messy, and looks essentially the same. Hindsight is 20/20.



Finished Wood Hex