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 Brick Resource

Blistered hot glue finger



I must start off this post with a cautionary tale of a girl and her glue gun. A girl, that is now only typing with 9 fingers. I have wielded a glue gun for many years.  I had grown arrogant enough to think that I didn't really get burned by the hot glue any longer, that I had somehow grown immune over the years. My hubris was my own downfall. While switching between tacky glue and hot glue, I accidentally squeezed the gun too hard, and a giant glob of hot glue started falling towards my beloved hexes.  I scooped it up with my index finger, only to find that hot glue in large quantities stays hot longer than small dabs. And thus my blistered finger. Did you know it's really hard to type without your index finger?

Brick Bridge - Before & After

Anyways, onto why you are really reading - the brick resource!  The resource I actually call by the right name! The resource where I hit a major mental block on what to do to make it 3D. Try Googling brick or clay fields.  The result don't lend themself well to 3D Settlers, as fields are pretty flat. While playing around with the tiny bricks I bought at the miniature doll store, I had no idea what I wanted to do. At first my husband and I toyed with the idea of cutting the bricks down to 1/8 of what they already were at, to keep them at a closer scale to the rest of the hexes.  But accurately scoring and cutting tiny pieces of brick from an already small piece of brick proved...difficult. Enter Kate, who is staying with us for a few days (you can see her on the right, I think she's the only person following this blog). She was also google imaging bricks, and we saw a small bridge picture.  You could literally see the light bulbs going on.

So armed with my trusty glue gun (sigh), and some bricks, we created a brick bridge!  I then used some of my grab bag moss to sponge/paint on some red & gold paint to try to make the bridge look less like small bricks glued together, and more like a weathered bridge.  I also glued some of the moss on the bottom and winding up the edges to make it look  older. We toyed with the idea of putting a river under the bridge, but once we put it on the hex, we realised there wasn't really space for a river in addition to the number token.


Completed Brick  hex