Locarno
Forty comuni above Lake Maggiore
▶ Play it onlineForty pieces covering the lake shore and the valleys above it, at a scale where individual villages are their own pieces. The Verzasca and Onsernone valleys are the star turns — narrow, steep, and unmistakable in relief. Assembling this is genuinely difficult, in the way a good puzzle should be, because most of the pieces are wedge-shaped valley slices that look alike until you read the terrain on them.
What a child works out
- Mountain villages sit exactly where the ground allows and nowhere else.
- The terrain on a piece is a better clue than its outline.
- A commune can be a single valley with fifty people in it.
A download, to print yourself
- A .3mf file with the colours already assigned
- One STL per piece, for any other slicer
- A print guide with the settings and the order to print in
- For your own use; the licence is in the download
What you need to print it
- A build plate that takes 250 × 176 mm: the Bambu Lab A1, P1S and X1C (256 mm) do, the A1 mini (180 mm) does not
- A multicolour setup such as an AMS, for the colours as designed
Printed it? Got an idea?
Send me photos of your print and I'll add them to this page — or tell me what you'd add, leave out or change on Locarno.
The plate
- Pieces
- 36 pieces
- Plate
- 250 × 176 mm
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 233 m
- Vertical exaggeration
- × 1
- Thickness
- 8.8 mm
- Smallest piece
- 99 mm²
- Fit
- 0.35 mm clearance
- Material
- PLA, printed in Switzerland
B5 — the size of a school exercise book.
How much ground one millimetre of plate covers.
Height is stretched by this factor so the relief is readable at desk size.
Nothing is cut smaller than a child can pick up.
Printed in place, so every piece seats first time without sanding.
Every named piece
- Borgnone
- Brione sopra Minusio
- Brione Verzasca
- Brissago
- Cavigliano
- Corippo
- Cugnasco Gerra
- Frasco
- Gerra
- Gordola
- Gresso
- Indemini
- Intragna
- Isorno
- Lago Maggiore Langensee
- Lavertezzo
- Locarno
- Losone
- Magadino
- Mergoscia
- Minusio
- Mosogno
- Onsernone
- Orselina
- Palagnedra
- Piazzogna
- Ronco sopra Ascona
- San Nazzaro
- SantAbbondio
- Sonogno
- Tegna
- Tenero Contra
- Vergeletto
- Vira Gambarogno
- Vogorno
- Water body
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