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!

Making terrain boards -

I've been asked to describe how I make my terrain boards - but since this required a lot of explanation, I've made it into a complete new new section: it can be accessed from the menu at the upper right.

Terrain boards III -

I've reached an important point today in my terrain board project: I now have the first 6 boards completed, and thus have enough to play a regular (Modern) Spearhead game on - these six boards cover a standard 1800 by 1200 gaming table (that's 6 by 4 foot for those of you still stuck in the feudal age...).

It's taken a while to get here, but it's been a reasonably enjoyable process, and I feel a lot more confident now that I will be able to complete the project.  If not soon, at least eventually!  Of course, the upcoming boards are likely to take even more time to make than these ones have...  Still, at least the winter break is coming up.

It's quite hard to see the outlines of the various knolls, rises, and hills from a photo taken directly from above like these ones have been, so here's an alternative view with the contours drawn in.  I've also removed the size distortion caused by an off-centre camera position, so the 6 boards are now all perfectly squared off; by saving each board as an individual layer in Photoshop, I can simply shuffle them around and use the rotate command to arrange them how I like, and then the resulting image can be ported straight into the battle roster sheet used to play the game.  Vertically flipping the final image also gives my opponent a picture from their viewpoint; if I arrange a game with Aaron, I can send him the file beforehand so he can plot his moves before we even set the game up "in the flesh" which should maximize our precious gaming time.

These six boards are rather generic, since they don't feature any water features or any truly large hills.  My remaining two water-less boards both feature bigger hills (one a whopping 5 contours high; which is a fraction over 2 centimetres high on-table), and the remaining 8 boards have either wide rivers (depicted about 40 mm across on average, and thus too wide to be bridged by an AVLB; they need to be spanned by pontoon bridges, or swum); narrow rivers (less than 25 mm across, and bridgeable); or a a combination of the two.  Despite this, they can still be put together to give some degree of battlefield variety.

This setup on the left, for example, features a much flatter table centre, with hills clustered on the flanks.  This could easily lead to a really open battlefield, but could still be closed down considerably with a few well-placed woods.  The spots where the board corners meet are particularly ripe spots for woods, since this will also disguise the ugliest part of the join...  I'm thinking of making my woods with a painted felt base (so it they flex over hills), surrounded by flock on the edges to hide the inevitable ruffled edges you get with felt; I intend to make a removable flocked canopy for each wood as well, to properly hide troops on the inside.

This setup on the right looks a lot more crowded, despite using the same 6 boards.  The table centre is cluttered with hills, and the flanks are not entirely open either - the most open spots are the extreme corners, which you don't really notice, and in any case, they don't see much game play, because you can't flank march into them.  It helps that most of the boards have their hills asymmetrically distributed, so rotating them can make the centre or edges more or less cluttered in turn.

This table on the left shows a progression from very flat on the right to much more hilly on the left.  Note that two of the boards only have 3 road exits/entrances, which cuts down connectivity slightly, making for a more realistic road net, but also cuts down on the number of board permutations that are possible (especially with only 6 boards completed!).  It also better conforms to Keith's scenario system recommendations, which gives an average of 8 off-table road exits for an entire table.  The roads are fairly windy, because these 6 boards are rather rural in nature; some of my boards with rivers will feature somewhat straighter road sections, and contiguous built-up area sections, rather than only isolated ones.  The river boards have all been carved out, by the way; but getting the actual water done will no doubt be fairly tricky.

Terrain boards II - 

I've now finished the first two of my terrain boards, and nearly finished the second two - they just require further spraying with dilute PVA and then matt varnish.

The rear two are the ones that are already properly sealed - the process seems to have very slightly darkened the colour tones.  The front two have had their first PVA spray; they'll get 3 or more 4 more coats and then a couple of matt varnish sprays on top.  The PVA spray is done over the bath/shower so the wayward spray can be washed away easily.  The varnish isn't water-soluble (naturally!) so I do that outside, on the balcony, with some newspaper to catch any spray drift.

Here's a shot of the two finished ones joined together.  While the join is "obvious" from above, it is not overly distractingly so, I think.  You can see there are effectively two configurations of boards here - the roads on each board edge either exit/enter either all one third or all two thirds of the way along their respective edges.  This means I have essentially two independent sets of boards that must be arranged in a quincunx manner to get them to meet up properly.  You can see in the first shot above what happens if you don't align them properly - the two front boards are both of the same "set", and thus don't abut properly - the roads don't meet up. 

From a lower angle, as seen to the left, the join between two boards is of course not quite so obvious.  You can also see that warping isn't a problem at all - the stiffness of the boards is enhanced when they are joined (aided by the flocking and sealing), and flattens them out.  Hopefully they will stay that way - touch wood - the flexibility of the mats should enable them to be pushed around sufficiently into shape even if they do warp a bit.

This quincunx configuration sacrifices flexibility, in that half the boards will only mate with the other half, greatly reducing the number of possible configurations for a given set of boards.  And it also means I have to essentially keep the two half-sets "separate but equal" in terms of what they look like and how they are stored.  Nonetheless there are good reasons for doing this...  The first one is that if you have your road exit/entrances positioned centrally in each board edge then you have a much more stereotypical board layout.  Since each board would have the same road exit/entrance set-up, this means adjacent boards will the the same, meaning the road network looks more like a grid than a net.  Fine of you are modelling Nebraska, but not Europe.  With the 1/3-2/3 set-up, adjacent boards are not the same, as the road joins between adjacent edges are off-set 200 mm from each other, leading to a less regular appearance.

In this shot to the right you can see a board with not much in the way of vertical relief - there are just two small hull-down positions visible here, which interestingly are a lot harder to spot in this photo than they are with the naked eye, even with a dash of differently coloured flock on their tops to help pick them out.  This is one of the flattest of the board set-ups I have; most have a bit more in the way of contours than this one.  Still, there are a few light hedgerows that break up lines of sight, and woods can always be added on top of the boards to further clutter things up.

You can see a somewhat larger hill on the board shown to the left; the top-level contours are picked out in lighter-coloured flock because of their in-game importance in providing not only spotting but also hull-down positions.  From the bottom of the hill to the top summit position is just over a centimetre in vertical gain, which isn't a lot in absolute terms, but still means an overall gradient of something like 1 in 5 or 6, and it is obviously steeper in places.  This is steeper than I'd like, but carving slopes from foam shallower than this proved very challenging (I thought having the hills made of something different from the mats would be asking for trouble in terms of warping, not to mention negating the flexibility inherent in the mat material).  I'm pretty happy with the results here.  Sure it's taking time, but it's turning out to be quite fun to do.

The other main reason for my quincunx set-up is to do with rivers.  When I put together various arrangements on paper with the roads all positioned centrally, it became apparent that any rivers obviously couldn't be so positioned - so where would they go?  They would have to be off-set, which I figured would lead to a similar quincunx arrangement anyway (although I have subsequently realized there would be one way of doing it with only a single set of river tiles).  So my rivers are positioned such that their joins are centrally positioned - since any one standard gaming table of six boards will have so few rivers on it compared to roads, the regularity of their positioning isn't so apparent.

This evening I will start on doing two boards which feature large hills, which call for roads going over low points on the hills at some point.  I have still to decide exactly how I will model the surface of the roads where the cross the hills; my two options are either cutting out a card or thick paper road surface and laying it over the top of the rough road path that is currently in place, or smoothing the current path over with a layer of sand mixed with PVA.  I'll probably go for this later option, as it won't result in the road surface being elevated above the surrounding terrain, which is fine on the flat, but not when crossing a hill...

Terrain boards I -

Today the family were out doing things without me, so after getting some housework out of the way, I took the opportunity to look at my work bench.  The main thing on it at the moment is a set of 16 terrain boards I have started work on.  Not completed, it should be noted!  Inspired by a post of Rhys Batchelor's last year bemoaning the state of the terrain that gets used for moderns games, I thought I should make a start at improving my lot.  Unlike ancients gaming, where the most important "terrain" you need is a well-painted cloth to cover the table, moderns gaming requires a lot more attention to details.  So over New Year, I planned a set of terrain boards based on 600 mm by 600 mm units, since these both dovetail nicely with Keith McNelly's scenario rules, which use sectors that size, and you can easily buy interlocking foam mats that size, which I thought would make a good basis for "boards".   I decided I would need 16 of them to give a decent variety of terrain - 6 are required for a standard "table".

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I have had 16 of these things sitting on my bench for over half a year, undercoated green, awaiting further work.  So today I restarted work on them.  I painted roads on half of them - the half without river or streams, which are going to require a lot more work.  The first 8 should at least let me get a few games out of them before I feel the need to use more.  Then I started flocking one, as you can see to the left.  I've bought a bunch of flock, and mixed various types to give an appropriate variety of shades of green and brown; I suspect I will have to buy more before the end, as I will probably run out at some point.  I've also added some "clump foliage" to make some light hedgerows.  Note the two sunken areas on the flocked board above left; these are spaces for built-up areas that can be slotted in once the boards have been positioned. 

I am anticipating the boards will have to be mostly stored stacked on top of each other, so they can't have too much relief sticking out, especially fiddly bits like steeples or trees.  This will also mean I can more easily use the boards for WW2 by using different, more old-fashioned buildings.  The photo to the right shows one of the BUA spaces filled in (the road colour needs lightening).  I am modelling hills "in the round", but they need to be relatively low to stop troop bases sliding off: a single-contour hull-down position is modelled as being 5 mm high, while proper hills vary from 1 to 2 cm high, depending on how many contours they have.

You can see such a hill here with the top contour picked out in a different shade of green so you know where it is.  Woods will be separate features added on top - I like the ones that Rhys knocked up last September for the games we played at his place, and will use something similar.  Now, critical to how well these boards will stand up to actual use will be how well the flock stays in place.  So I will next be spraying the whole board several times with dilute PVA to bond it all together, and finally with a matt varnish to seal it all in.  Hopefully it should be enough.

In hindsight, there are all sorts of other approaches that come to mind about how I could have got a decent enough effect without the hassle of flock... simply cutting up a painted felt cloth and sticking it to the mats, for example!  (The interlocking teeth part wouldn't have been so simple, but it would definitely have been less work than all the flocking I am going to have to do).