For Christmas, we made each other gifts, and my eldest son had the idea to build my youngest son a set of building blocks to make a castle for Playmobil-scale people. The boys love playing with their Playmobil knights and Roman warriors. The also have vikings, pirates and various other warriors that they mix in for some excitement. Imagine what a battle between the Playmobil French Knights and the Playmobil Romans would have been like, with Playmobil Egyptian chariot support and Playmobil pirate artillery… the mind boggles.

I sat down with Google Sketchup (which is an amazing, free 3d design program that is very easy to learn) and designed some blocks that could be made easily by gluing cubes and rectangles together. Using some figures as a reference, I made the blocks the correct scale to be used by Playmobil people. I used the tablesaw to cut up some old scrap oak (leftover church pew ends…) and then left Josh to sand and glue them together. Here are the results:

The gun ports are the right height for a Playmobil character to aim a gun or crossbow out of.

And the towers and crenellations are sized for standing armed Playmobil soldiers too. The little ledges for the soldiers to stand on were Josh’s brainchild. He really wanted to be able to have forces on the walls shooting overtop.

Including the doorway, there are only 7 kinds of blocks. The actual gates aren’t complete yet, but I’m not sure they’re needed. They boys have fun playing with it as is. You can see in this picture how the blocks are all made up of cubes and rectangles glued together.

Here’s the entire set of blocks:

Here’s the plan in Google Sketchup:

And here’s the Google Sketchup File for my Playmobil scale wooden castle blocks.

They can, of course, be assembled in any way that they want, and they have been used to make houses and two smaller opposing forts as well as the big castle.

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