Wednesday 30 December 2015

Instant battlefield!

Following on from Aaron's purchase, I got together 25 of these "fluffy boa" mats.  Mine were a beige colour, rather than the somewhat lime green of Aaron's, so I planned on doing a quick spray to give them some hint of foliage.

The things actually turned out to be 30 cm square overall, and thus 29 cm from centre to centre.  I stripped the covering off some of them with a knife to make up some river sections, and them took them outside to spray them with a little green.  Since the mats cost just 108 yen each, that meant the cost of the spray increased the price of the endeavour by something like 35%! Still, very cheap I think.

A 4 foot by 3 foot setup on my tiny Japanese kitchen table...

 I then took them inside, and got a brush to paint the river sections brown.  I've gone off blue rivers, since a) battles were not always fought on a sunny day, and b) a river small enough to be fordable will have been forded both before and during the conflict, muddying it up, and a river big enough to be unfordable is likey to be carrying a heavy sediment load in any case!  I had to use a razor to completely remove the last of the fluff once I had peeled the stuff off, since a little adheres to the foam through the webbing.

I'd use a 5 by 4 table for "Lost Battles" - but not on this table!

 All up, this took me about 4 hours work, but at least half of that is because I have very unsuitable facilities here for spraying.  If I was back in NZ (subjunctive? what's one of them, then?), the business would have taken closer to 2 hours, I reckon.
This would do fine for a "To the Strongest!" game; with 3x3 boxes per mat.

Anyway, I'm pretty chuffed with the results, given the price (say 40 bucks all told) and the time taken.  I'll be looking out for more!






6 comments:

  1. Looks good! Have found more, but at another shop, and slightly larger than the ones we already have...

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    1. That's no good: they need to be compatiblde! I've got 30 more now - in green too, which is a plus - and am sure I can get some more next time I pop in to my loval shop...

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  2. Replies
    1. Starting with the green mats makes things even easier. I'll have to post some shots some time.

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  3. Bonjour
    Ou avez-vous trouvés des COGS ?
    Ma fabrication avec l'impression 3D n'est pas très conforme
    http://doc.faclab.org/projets/un-cogs-et-une-water-way-pour-de-bellis-antiquitatis/

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    1. When I played DBM a lot I used many cogs & nefs in my medieval armies. You can see just a few here (very low resolution photos, unfortunately - this was the 90s!) There were made from balsa wood for the hulls; if I recall correctly, the sails were made by draping two sheets of wet paper around a cylinder, and allowing them to dry gleed together. The ones in the photos there were actually mde by Rhys Batchelor, not myself. The sails of the nefs really need to be angled away from the line of travel.

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