Snowcraft – Building a Lego Snowfort from giant Lego snow-bricks

If you build snow&ice structures, keep in mind that some can be dangerous for young kids who later come across this very compelling structure.

Especially igloo/cave/house, or other structure that can otherwise collapse atop small ones.

Even if structurally sound when built, it can change rapidly over time, due to melting, snowfall, and play.

If you can't check it frequently, to make sure that it's not in a state that can collapse and result in tragedy in a matter of minutes, then you probably want to disassemble it (and spread it out).

I went to school at Ohio University, which is in Athens, OH - the Southern part of the state. Snowfall was pretty rare down there, we p probably only got one good one a year.

I was also in a fraternity - a source of lots of good times and also some bad ones. But most importantly for this story, it meant that I knew about 50 different guys on campus.

In my senior year we got a pretty awesome fall of packing snow, and the house where I was living had a big parking lot as basically its backyard, which served as parking for 12-15 cars for nearby houses. Classes were cancelled.

So, that morning me and the other couple guys who lived in my house put on our best approximation of snow appropriate clothes, and went outside to the parking lot to build a fort. We starting making bricks with our recycling container, which was about the size of a 44qt storage tub. Our goal was to make an igloo big enough for a circle of about 15 of us to sit, so our first layer needed something like 30 blocks.

Time went on, and various other bros starting showing up. By the end of the day, we had 20 young dudes shoveling snow into those recycling totes. Even with that amount of workers, it was slow progress. The fort was humongous! But after working for a few hours, we had a circle about 10-12 feet in diameter with walls 4 feet high.

At that point our resolve to build an actual igloo had crumbled, and we were running out of easily accessed parking lot snow, so we compromised, and threw a big white tarp over the whole thing. Just like that, we had our giant fort, roofed over (and hey, safer too).

It was an all day job to get that far, and the rewards were worth it - we sat out in the fort with frozen asses, drinking very cold beer and filling it up with pot smoke, laughing and singing and telling stories. It was a genuinely magical few days, it felt like building that thing together had broken down some cliques and brought our group of dudes together. Almost every brother stopped by at least once.

It didn't occur to me until later that that was probably the last time in my life all the conditions would line up to build something that large out of snow. How often do you find a huge parking lot, covered in packing snow, and 20 strapping young lads with nothing better to do than listen to some nerd telling them where to put it?

Good times.

They’re basically plastic 2x2 tiles that can be assembled into almost any structure you can think of (limited by the number of tiles you have).

They (we!) loved making forts and tunnels with them.

Just last week, one of my sons and his friends broke them out when playing nerf guns. He’s 16.

It’s such a shame they stopped making them (maybe they were too expensive). They were even hard to find when I got them several years ago. Someone should really make something like these again.

[1] https://gofatherhood.com/2010/02/review_fun_huge_building_bl...

I want to see them try 2 x 4 bricks though. Much overlap.

I miss big snowfalls.

I found a version of it on Archive.org [1] and a mirror on Github [2] that shockingly run perfectly!

[1] https://archive.org/details/snowcraft_game [2] https://github.com/seanpm2001/Snowcraft

But it looks like the bricks themselves aren't hollow like they're supposed to be, and that they can't even be stacked to build a structure that's even remotely level or structurally sound.

Clearly this is "lego" in name only.

Unless you're somehow driving corresponding holes into the bottoms of your bricks, what advantage do the pips on top provide? If anything, they seem like they'd make it less stable.

jokes aside they won't as it's good PR, they are very peculiar about how they selectively enforce their trademark in media articles