Ever wanted to build your own mini-city on a tabletop, but realized there weren’t too many options in toy buildings and other infrastructure available at hobby shops? Yeah, city building fans are like unwanted children when it comes to fun things. If you’d still like to take a break from SimCity to build miniature urban landscapes you can touch, Ittyblox offers a potential avenue to satiate your longing.
Created by architectural enthusiast Steve Fox, it’s a series of 3D-printed buildings that you can assemble into a sprawling mini-metropolis. Whether you’re building a personal vision of an alternate downtown Chicago or a playground of destruction for your favorite Godzilla monster figures, this is exactly the toy you need to kick up your diorama city-building into high gear.
Sold through 3D-printing service Shapeways, Ittyblox currently has a collection of 20 or so buildings, each of which are rendered with carefully detailed elements. You’ll probably have to color over these yourself (since you’re only being charged for the 3D printing), but that only means more time to sink into your new obsessive hobby. Each building is scaled 1:1000, so you can put together a reasonably huge city without overtaking an entire room the way you’ll end up doing with the much larger-sized LEGO Architecture box sets. Aside from the buildings, Ittyblox also sells base plates so you can group your buildings into blocks just like a real city. Now, all you need is to figure out how to add roads and life will be complete (it really won’t, but a man can dream).
Pricing for Ittyblox varies from $5.90 for a small Miami hotel to $69.95 for a set of NYC buildings.