Sate your Cities Skylines obsession with Lego micro skyline MOCs: From Mordor to The Little Mermaid, and heaps of real-life cities too
My little nano-heart is doing somersaults
If there's one thing my heart cannot handle, it's objects that are far smaller than they have any right to be. I'm not allergic to adorableness, though my throat does close up somewhat causing me to form generally indecipherable words several octaves higher than usual. I've found my kryptonite in bonsai trees, micro pigs, and now this: Micro Lego skylines.
Seriously, why did no one tell me mini Lego skylines were a thing? In fact, don't get me any of the best Lego sets for my birthday, I'm pivoting to something called MOCs. Admittedly this is an acronym I've just discovered, but it's one that's used all the time in the Lego community. MOC just stands for 'My Own Creation', and is used to refer to a fan-made design that's either made from spare bricks, or reassembled – AKA. 'rebricked' (so many new words today) – from official Lego sets.
Now that's outta' the way, this morning has been an itty-bit of a journey for me. From spotting the fascinatingly intricate work of Lego builder Roanoke Handybuck on Brothers Brick, to a realization that hit like the pain of stepping on several Legos at once. I now realize I'd been wasting my life playing the buggy-yet-charming Cities: Skylines 2 video game when I could have been joining in with Lego builders world-round to make my very own Lego skylines instead.
Not only did I find a veritable cornucopia of these MOCs on Rebrickable, including a host of micro Skylines mimicking cities all over the globe, there are also fantasy cities and regions wrought from Plate and Bar and Stud. Everything from Super Mario Brother's, to Jurrassic Park, to the Futurama skyline. There's even one for each of the Lord of the Rings and Star Wars movies.
As prolific nano-builder denjohan notes in the description of their nano version of the Venice Skyline, "The small scale makes details rather hard to achieve". Yet somehow they managed to fit a recognisable rendition of the Floating City onto a 2x12 Lego plate. That's some talent.
For a small price, and sometimes for free, you can get hold of the fan-made instructions to build these little skylines yourself. There's even a section under each design to help you source the exact selection of bricks necessary to make them, if you don't have them lying around already.
I believe you've just witnessed my rebirth into the Lego fandom, so I thank you for sitting in to welcome me. Be right back while I build a shelf to house a neverending nano Lego skyline around my entire bedroom.
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Katie is a freelance writer covering everything from video games to tabletop RPGs. She is a designer of board games herself and a former Hardware Writer over at PC Gamer.