Castle on a Mountain Playset

The castle playset has just hit its first milestone - thank you so much to everybody who has supported it thus far! So, it's time for a celebratory update...

Back when I was designing this, the main person I talked to was my daughter, who was five years old at the time (she has since turned six). I watched her as she played with the original castle and its minifigs, and asked her questions about what she wanted in a playset. And some of the answers were quite surprising...

And those are the main insights she gave me that led to this castle being designed as it was.

Again, thank you to everybody who has supported this. Please do tell others - for the next milestone update, the castle gets minifigs.

We're up above fifty supporters, and thank you to every single one! So, I thought this might be a good time to show off the original castle that my little brother and I built.

My brother and I didn't have a lot of Lego growing up, but we did have some, and a decent amount of imagination. And, I loved knights and castles, and had read all about the development of castles from the motte-and-bailey to the stone castle we tend to think of today. The design of this one was mine, and I wanted to make sure it was defensible (well, a 15-17 year-old's vision of defensible) - so, the gate was nice and sturdy, and there was a well, and a stables. There were stairs up to the wall, and a space where minifigs could walk around the tower.

We barely had enough pieces to finish it. The keep is an empty shell, and by the time we finished it, we were scrounging (and that really shows when you look at the top of it). We didn't have enough piece of any given colour to make the walls uniform, so I staggered them a bit to hopefully make it look like something other than patchwork. Many of the parapet plates are from a couple of space sets my parents had given us. And, as for the minifigs...well, up until I bought a combined armourer/wagon set, those were the only castle pieces I had (and the combined set sadly is in the wind).

So, here is the castle, for your enjoyment, photographed on our cluttered kitchen table (sorry for the mess, but two small children will make cleaning a bit difficult). It's a bit on the basic side, but it's the last thing my brother and I built out of Lego, and that makes it precious. A couple of pieces have been lost (and there's a repair here and there, mainly from pieces that my wife and I found in our backyard after we bought our house). The little modern space thing is my daughter's.