Saturday, October 03, 2009

Wedgits color changes

I got the opportunity to play a bit with the pink & purple Activity Tote.

This is the first time I've built from designs intended for a building board. Until now, I've built regular designs on a building board (often a benefit) or free-styled (not my forte).

I liked it.

For all the the P&P Tote designs, the board is the base. For some of the Starter Tote designs, the building board is actually in the middle of the design. Some of the recent booklet designs use two building boards, one as a base, and one in the middle. I look forward to building those as well at some point.

The big thing with this set, though, is for the first time when building from designs, you need to choose the color for the size, and the size isn't always clear from the color.

Since building with Wedgits from designs is part puzzle and part construction exercise, this enhances the experience nontrivially. I really liked it.

Not saying that these particular colors are easy on the sensibilities, but Wedgits aficionados ("Wedgitizers"?) shouldn't pass this set by just because of the colors - it has a lot to offer.

As usual, the cards have errors: the design is on the front and which parts are used is supposed to be indicated on the back, but many cards have the wrong backs - presumably a layout error in preparing the job for printing. I've also already found one design that I'm pretty sure can't be built with the parts included - a hidden piece of course.

But again as usual, the benefits outweigh those problems. The P&P Tote is a great set.

I enjoyed building with two colors (color groups in the P&P case), that I went back to my Class Pak and built some Deluxe Set designs from pairs of colors in the 100 Advanced Design Cards. (It doesn't take very much Wedgits play for me to come back to thinking that the Class Pak is the best buy in standard size Wedgits.)

This time, I was choosing the colors at each step by whim, with the desire to get nice contrast and symmetry within the design - while trying to anticipate what colors I needed to hold back to sustain the balance and symmetry to the final stages of the design - I had to back some out and make different choices more than once. Fun.

Good Block Play.

-=-
I apologize for the distracting cropping in the top image - I thought with the building board I wouldn't have to worry so much about what was underneath, and the lovely maple leaves only blew so enticingly into that single frame which had probably the worst lower-edge problem.

No comments: