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The Bar or as I like to think of it “Open Air” Bar is a module that replaces what was formerly the Yellow Module (see older posts) within my castle setup.  The now defunct Yellow Module looked too much like a haunted house and didn’t add anything of value to the castle as a whole and that’s where this comes in.  I find I have a very hard time working with yellow bricks as well because they don’t scream “castle”.  Luckily as I learned from fixing the Blue Module recently almost anything can look like it belongs when you stretch it horizontally and don’t try too hard vertically.  I guess I’m just not good at going vertical, but when I decided to do the bar which was on the list of things to accomplish anyway and decided that it would be “open air” so I could actually see into it and enjoy the details this just sort of all worked out.  Here’s the bar part up close:

I have yet to fill it out with more cups and figures to drink from them but I rather enjoy how this turned out.  Keg on tap in in the left corner, storage bin on the right, little green bits as wine bottles, misc shelving and nothing here is overbearing unlike some of my previous attempts at modules.

Below is a shot of the Bar Module with two yellowish connector modules that I built specifically for it.  I’ve figured out aesthetic wise that fanning the offending color (yellow in this case but I pulled this trick with the Blue Module when I fixed it recently as well) horizontally into some wall bits makes the actual module seem to blend better.  Even better I got to use up 8, yes 8 of those Kingdoms/Castle balcony pieces that never seem quite right in my own designs so that was some good useless brick action as well.

See how well that blends?  Just imagine someone strolling down the length of the castle wall and stopping in for a drink!  That’s some sweet guard duty.

Recently on another post I put up a picture of the Blue Module, something I started a few weeks before Christmas as an attempt to gather blue bricks together and build a generic starter module for my castle setup.  The original post shows the base unit, followed by my first tweak to it done a couple weeks later where a painter was introduced for fun.  After that the thing sat on my shelf where the castle modules are being lined up with intentions of expansion.

Expansion finally happened over the course of the last few days and I’m happy to share my horrible failure with this particular hunk of castle.  Where I really went wrong was trying to do too much with it, getting away from a Castle/Kingdoms theme and getting cocky with design that failed to meet the standard I’m looking for, which is in a nutshell:  Something that looks good from the angle my desk is at when I look up at the shelf, looks like it fits with the rest of the castle modules and is “fun”.  I got fun, but that’s it.

Issue 1:  Tennis Court on the roof is invisible from where I look up at it so pointless, even though I loved the use of a Series 3 minifigure to make it happen.  I did enjoy splitting the roof into turrets that became court halves though.

Issue 2:  In the last revision of the Blue Castle Module the painter was higher up the lift and it looked better.  I did give him more color filled bricks already in place this time though which wrap around the side (not visible in this pic) and liked that better.  He’ll still be in the next revision, just repositioned probably.

Issue 3:  See the archer?  He’s on a very squarish balcony.  I didn’t use many underslopes in this module and it rather sucks compared to the other modules where things transition better.  I can’t look at THAT much blockiness, even given the medium.

Issue 4: Piss poor blending.  I like the blacksmiths I have from various sets and they deserve a place in the castle.  I think I was premature trying to force one in here.  You can’t see it from this shot but the little fireplace does have a chimney going up the outside.  I had some other blacksmithy stuff to stick in there but stopped before I got that far because I knew this was coming down.  I’m keeping that butcher setup though, somehow.  That’s my favorite Series 6 minifigure and it’s hilarious in a castle… my fun, my whimsy, whatever.  =)

Issue 5:  It just didn’t look like a castle module when it was all put together.  Did I mention I did this when I was pretty sick and delerious?  Fun but stupid… I think I need to tear down most of this and reimagine a lot of bits before daring to go this far again.  Here’s the overall view:

Bah!

I’m fairly sure that the Kingdom’s Theme is dead or at least suspended now after watching them not show back up online and now that I’ve had a chance to look at pictures from the LOTR and a few other themes that are about to come out it seems like Kingdom’s would be redundant.

As far as LOTRs goes I think the new Helms Deep set contains a tons of the right mix of grey bricks that get used in our castle building here on Module Pages.  The new monsters theme seems to have that Dracula Castle which is also loaded with the same sort of brick.  With those two themes alone being dead on for castle parts, what’s the use of Kingdom’s right?  I do hope it gets relaunched with some new stuff later, like perhaps a Falcon faction since we have that one lone falcon knight in the joust set.

I’m also damn interested in the upcoming City theme that involves mining because it seems like it is going to provide a whole bunch of the earth tone type bricks that you love Blockman.  Anyway, that’s my take on it.  If you haven’t hunted this stuff down yet Blockman, go check out this:  link which shows the 2012 Summer sets.

Meanwhile as I actually manage to dent my larger blocks that I need in great numbers for castle modules I’ve started hunting for some replacements.  Currently I’m trying to figure out which existing sets have the most Kingdoms like pieces.  I actually have an endless supply of misc bits, but the larger bricks go fast.  Seems the Star Wars theme probably wins since there are a lot of grays.  Other than that I may need to consider getting a basic brick bucket if I can find one with some gray in the mix.  I thought about haunting garage sales for lots of bricks, but I’m too lazy on Saturday mornings.  That’s one line I’m not crossing, even if someone’s throwing out their kid’s old stuff.  =)

I created a nice end cap or tall oddity for my castle in a roundabout way.  Originally a couple weeks ago I had set out to work on building a “Tower of Sandra” which as you know Blockman is one of the deities in our RPG.  The holy symbol of Sandra being the hourglass, I naturally tried to build a building front with an hourglass design.  Turns out after two attempts that I really sucked at that.

Moving along I thought I’d try something related so I could still call my creation the “Tower of Sandra.”  A clock came to mind.  It took awhile but ultimately I made a disturbing looking failure once again.  However I ran with the giant clock/clockworks/gears sort of theme and built what I now call the Gear House Module.  The Gear House Module at least in my head is a castle oddity that has some sort of vast machine housed inside of it.  I think if I had to explain this inside the RPG setting I would say it probably operates pumps that supply the castle with water and/or regulates “other” fluids, possibly even involves some sort of internal factory.  All I know is I wanted to rock the gears and I’m happy to use pieces I know I won’t find another task for on the castle end of things and that’s why I now love this.

It stands as the third tallest building in my castle so far, I not only got to use gear/technic type bits (those gears actually spin and connect on the front segments) but it allowed me to use the Catwoman figure in a fun way as well, as you can see from her scaling the roof with a diamond in hand.  Maybe she just got away from the castle’s vault, damned if I know.  The top balcony also takes cues from your post on here Blockman about the detachable areas you like building, mostly because I had some other stuff there at first which I disliked but had left myself many holes to plug into so that made sense to snap in.

It looks pretty neat from several different angles, but I didn’t want to go to all that photo editing effort for the blog, heh.  This is the view from the ground at an angle, about what it looks like from my desk.  Seen from the other side there’s a chimney built in and it like this side otherwise with the option to stick another module on and continue of course.  Luckily I’m dealing with about 13 feet of shelving space here to try and fill out so I can continue on like this and will probably run out of bricks before I run out of space.   I’m already seeing a huge dent in my supplies so it could get trickier in the future if I keep building. =)

I may be crossing a line with this one, even more so than what I did with Jar Jar on the Red Module, but the Castle Wall Garden Stereotype Connection Module is a pretty sweet addition to my castle overall as far as I’m concerned, bringing some humor and making one of the boring castle parts a bit more exciting.   Basically I’ve got the main modules which I keep talking about on this blog, but none of them are built to fit against each other.  All of them are assumed to have a boring little lesser wall piece, a “connection module” if you will placed between them.  To date I had built two such boring little things and while they add to the “castle” look they don’t amuse me much.  This one though, this amuses me because I got to use a collectible minifigure and make use of some of green and brown pieces I avoid in the normal modules.

Assume when seeing this that this connection module will be sandwiched between two larger modules, usually pressed back a couple bricks compared to the main modules, and that the idea here is that a bit of terrain overflows into the wall and has been turned into a useful gardening plot…   yeah yeah….  I’m crazy.