Construction Villageoise – N.K. Atlas

Construction Villageoise is a French building set from N.K. Atlas, Paris (series N 81, according to the lid). Square wooden pillars with grooves hold printed cardboard panels, together they form a small village with five buildings.

It uses the same principle as the German Eisenbahnbau Spiel: pillars with grooves and panels in between. Here the panels are thin printed cardboard of only 1.2 [mm], which makes the result look like a little cardboard village.

I could not find any documentation or any other listing of this set online. The lid itself turned out to be the best source: it names the five buildings and explains how to build them.

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The box

Reference:	Box name:	Nr of parts:
Série N 81	Construction Villageoise	18 cardboard panel types (22 pieces scanned), 1 folded tower, 2 small units, wooden pillars (not counted)

Box facts
Maker (lid)	N.K. Atlas, Paris
Box size	31 x 23 x 7.5 [cm]
Cardboard	1 - 1.2 [mm]
Pillars	10 - 10.3 [mm] square, 4 grooves
Groove	1.2 - 1.4 [mm] wide, 2.1 (+/- 0.3) [mm] deep

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Available buildings

The lid explains that the set contains the elements for five buildings, the same ones that are drawn on the lid: the church, the town hall with the schools, the inn, the farm and a small rustic house. I matched the loose parts to these buildings with the lid, the photos of the built models and some trial and error.

Building	Name in the library	Panels
l'Église	church	side wall (2x), front gable, chapel gable, slate roof (2x), folded tower
la Mairie avec les écoles	townhall	school wall, town hall wall, red roof (2x), gable (2x)
l'Auberge hôtellerie	inn	shop wall, lodging wall, balcony gable (2x), brick roof (2x)
la Ferme	farm	barn gable, house gable, awning wall (2x), thatch roof (2x)
une petite maison rustique	hut	plank walls (2x), wooden gable units (2x), thatch roof units (2x)

Some parts exist twice in the box (counts in the table are my reading of the scans and photos), so the table is an interpretation, not an official parts list.

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Building instructions

There is no leaflet in my box. The lid says (in French) that you choose the grooved wooden pillars to match the size of the building, and that the roofs go on last. When the whole village is built, the little architect can arrange it as he likes and add figures and animals.

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Parts

The cardboard parts are generic panels, except for two special cases: a tower that is made of one piece of cardboard (folded and glued, no wood needed, it sits on the ridge of the church roof) and two small ready-made units, a cardboard panel held by two wooden pillars.

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Some system characteristics

Here a short list of the system characteristics and how they are modelled in the Blender library:

Part types	Original	Library
Pillars	Wood, 10 x 10 [mm], 4 grooves	Box 10 x 10 [mm], no grooves, length from the scan
Pillar ends	Straight, or slanted to match the roof angle (45 [deg]); some with two parallel slanted ends	Modelled as measured
Panels	Printed cardboard, 1 - 1.2 [mm]	Solid, 1.2 [mm], whole [mm] sizes
Groove / insertion	2.1 [mm] deep, panel sits about 1 [mm] in the pillar	Panel sinks 1 [mm] into the pillar
Roofs	Cardboard plane held by two grooved pillars along the gable slope	Roof unit: plane + 2 pillars with slanted ends
Bay size	Walls 83 - 166 [mm], gables 85 - 92 [mm] wide	Same

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Building in Blender

The five example buildings are put together from the library parts: pillars in the corners, panels 1 [mm] into the pillars and roofs last, exactly like the original. I placed them like on my photo of the built village.

3D Models:

The example buildings are also exported as a GLB (Sketchfab), together with the Blender library file. A really nice little toy, and an easy one to build in 3D because all parts are simple panels.