Baby Godzilla attacks Tokyo (again)

Well I’m still looking at this one.

My current plan is to run it for my daughter’s 4th birthday next year. It would work well for a toddlers party.

Kids dress up in monster costumes, and have monster-theme party.

In big dining room, you have small city created from stencilled blocks of polystyrene or cardboard boxes - I’m thinking that small poly chillybins would work well. Much easier for kids as the scale is smaller.

Some of the boxes contain small presents, lollies, etc.

Kids get let in, and the monsters destroy the city! Lollies are consumed, and kids go wild. Much polystyrene is destroyed. Tokyo is in ruins.

Costume hire and party props are easy to get. Bulk poly or cardboard boxes are a bit harder since we’d need about 100+ of the small ones, and probably they’d get trashed. However, I think I can run the whole thing for under $200. I wonder if I could make a small business of this - I drop off the gear, set up the city, and pick up the rubble afterwards, all for $300 or so…

Anyone with a rugrat want to run one of these for their birthday party?

Steve - since I want to do this with fully grown adults I’d be more than happy to help out with stuff, especially city building (the big bit of experience I’d need). I was going to do this for my 21st but time caught up on me.

Nice comic mockup.

I’ll have to take this to email later, but I’d like to discuss ideas as to what building blocks to use and how to move/store/build etc. Relative costs and how to stencil also come into it.

For babies, you’d need blocks of about 30cm x 30cm x 20cm (I think).
For adults, you’d be looking more like 50cm x 50cm x 30cm (I think).
In both cases you’d need a few special blocks, like cylinders (if building sky tower), gabled roof, and so on. Also some cardboard/polystyrene squashable cars,

Polystyrene is good becaue

  • relatively cheap, especially to get custom made blocks
  • light and soft
  • smashes!
  • easy to buld
  • could use already existing things like poly chillyboxes
    but it is bad because
  • maybe TOO light
  • doesnt take paint well
  • likely to be broken and not reuseable
  • BULKY - not easy to store

Cardboard boxes are good because

  • cheaper than polystyrene
  • pack flat
  • take paint easily
    but bad because
  • a bit heavier and could hurt a toddler
  • take more time to assemble (from flatpack)
  • not so easy to get enough boxes of the smaller size

I’m looking into what sort of volumes you’d need to make if you wanted custom boxes or polystyrene, and what prices.

Another possbiility for polystyrene is to get the HUGE blocks and cut them up with a suitable saw of hot wire. This would be the cheapest way to get solid blocks, or odd shaped ones, I think, but might result in some rough edges

How about hollow polystyrene boxes? During the inorganic collection last month the local doctors’ put out stacks and stacks of polystyrene boxes, that I guess must have been used to delivered vaccines and stuff that needed to be kept chilled. I’ve no idea how long he’d been collecting all those boxes, but it might be worth while asking around medlabs or those sort of places.

The mother in me does fell obliged to point out that using polystyrene for young kids may be a bit of a choke hazard if thin bits break, especially if they’ve got younger rugrats around, as they often do. Also some adults (such as my husband) hate the sound of scrunching polystyrene, likening it to nails on blackboard.

Trouble is, I need 75 or 100 of these boxes, preferably all the same size, so its hard to find somewhere that chucks out enough. Hollow polystyrene is good - I thought of it earlier, as its lighter and softer than cardboard. Reuse would be better than getting new items, of course, if I can find somewhere with enough.

Also, I’d make the games for 3yo+ rugrats so old enough for choke hazard to be acceptably low.

I can find cardboard boxes cheaply enough to do 75 for $100.