Now there’s an idea…

Men try to build model railways that are exact miniatures… ‘Crewe 1959’ and so on. [But] there’s definitely more room for fantasy model railways. I would maybe build The H.P. Lovecraft Line.

I was never a practitioner in any serious way as a boy, but it’s still regrettable to hear that the tabletop craft is not being passed down from father to son in the way it once was. It seems destined to join the ‘Endangered Traditional Crafts’ red-list. I imagine that one thing that might pep up the appeal for pre-teens would be to cross-breed it with tabletop fantasy-horror RPGs and card-games. Many might also enjoy a few hours with a ‘Providence 1890-1937’ model railway builder-sim PC game, if it’s chock full of enjoyable Lovecraftian horror elements. Kind of like Sid Meier’s Railroads, but with night-gaunts and tentacles and tunnels under College Hill.

If the meantime the kids have yet another story/colouring-book heading their way this summer.

Slightly heavier in tone, there is also a major new tabletop game from the Achtung! Cthulhu guys. Against The Gods Themselves will be an easy-play story-driven game of time-travelling Nazis, it seems.