Monday, September 20, 2010

Playground

I recently moved to a new town, and I happily realised that I could easily fit a full size gameboard in the basement, It did'nt take long before the planning was started, and I have found a very nice guy who are interested in gaming, painting and modelling.
You can read all about his own project here: http://theforgottenplanet.blogspot.com/
We decided that we wanted to play Warmachine/Hordes so naturally the gameboard should be 4' x 4'.

Here is all the material just before we began to draw the major features on the board with a marker.
When we had measured everything so that the two halves could fit on the long side in every possible way we began to carve out the river, and added filler to the bottom.
Next we cut out the hills, I did'nt have enough styrolite for the hills so we had to settle for thick cardboard, but I think this will look just great too. We built the hills in layers, each a little smaller than the one below, and we fixated them with toothpicks and white glue. (Ok, this particular hill was made before we added filler to the river)
We also painted the roads and rivers with white glue and poured on sand, lots of sand, shaking of the excess sand. When the glue was somewhat dry we sprayed on a mix of 50/50 white glue and water to fixate the sand even more.
This was the end of day one, and later I finished the last hills and added a layer of filler to them to smoothen the edges of the cardboard layers.
The next day I added more filler (an entire 600ml jar of filler!) and started to put small pebbles at the more steep sides of the hills and at the river banks. Now this just looks strange, but I will add more sanded filler between the pebbles, and cut out bigger rocks from more styrofoam at some places. I also plan to add the occasional trees and bushes, not entire woods, those will be made as "regular" wargaming terrain, but enough of the random elements to make this board come to life more than the plain green field.

The idéa with this board is to have a flexible area with lots of options, it can be made as a lonley road on a countryside, as a road through a forest or as a small village, depending on the extra terrain laid out.

Later this week I will continue the modeling!

Oh, last week I also managed to paint and base a platoon of SS-Mortars for my Flames of War german army, they totally slaughtered my Brittish commandos (wich I commanded) last tuesday. Both armies are mine, so I claim at  least a small victory, but one day I shall win in that game! Now I will take on the project of making the bases less booring on the rest of my german SS army, pictures are in the pipeline...