Building a modular Gaming Table - Part 1 : Recalling all my previous attempts to make a gaming landscape

Before I begin, I recall all my attempts to make gaming landscapes.

Airfix times

My way to the modular wargame landscape is long and winded. It started, so to say, on an sunday afternoon when I was like 10 or 12 years old and two of my friends and I were building connectable landscape segments for our ‚little soldiers‘. We were heavily impressed by the ‚Battlefront‘ diorama kits from Airfix of which I owned the Guadalcanal-Set (japanese side). We had a great afternoon modelling our boards followed by a bad experience on the next day.

I always tried to get the set again. No chance.
And I can‘t find a picture where someone really
used the set to make a good diorama. 

Our landscapes were build on thick cardboard and we used a kind of powder (I think it consisted of wood and dried glue) for railroad landscaping that we had to mix with water to create a paste so that we could model the hills and streets. And of course a lot of craters from bombs like the ones on the 'Battlefront' board!

The next day all the pieces were unusable because the paste dried, shrunk and this warped the cardboard. That‘s an episode of my childhood that I can recall because there was so much fun and so much disappointment afterwards. 

Here is the Airfix diorama plate. I reconstructed a picture
from the web because I could‘t find a single
picture free from interference.

Fantasy Wargaming on a blanket

I started wargaming as we know it with an old bedsheet that I colored green with textile color and on that I drew a hexagonal grid with a marker. Having no concept how to build all the other landscape features I took little stones as rocks, made walls from the remnants of a wine shelf(!) and built a house, a bridge and a little castle made of scrap wood, carton and other rubbish. There was also a little lake that I made from an old mirror and I made trees of branch forks and moss. Not so great but somehow enough for our fantasy battles. Except the house, everything is gone now.

GeoHex

Around the year 2002 or so I bought a GEOHEX-Set, the famous landscaping system based on green flocked hexagonal formed styrofoam landscape pieces. Long forgotten now because the company closed, but back then it was for terrain what Dwarven Forge is for dungeons today. High end & expensive.

A picture of the set in action around 2007. And some of my old handmade trees . The houses are cardboard models from an Armalion expansion ('Kampf um Ilsur') and the most sturdy cardboard models I ever had.

The GeoHex set had all the parts to create nice looking hills and height lines. But it revealed the weakness of the hexagonal concept: you need a big amount of special pieces to close all the gaps. Outer corners, inner corners, wide angles, small angles and so on. And this doubles because you have pieces of full height and the pieces with slopes. You had only a few main complete main boards and all the other stuff was needed to close the gaps or form the outline.

From the GeoHex catalog.
The contents of one of the various sets.

The results looked very nice, but the included table cloth and the green flock gave away a lot of color. Standing at the side of the gaming table and touching it occasionally caused dirty clothes for everybody. Some years later the material showed a lot of weariness. Edges were broken and the surface had a lot of damages because it was made from normal styrofoam. (To be fair, pieces made from all kinds of foam have that problem.)

Also from the Geohex catalogue.
We can see that hexagonal systems need a lot of
different pieces and are not easy to set up. 

Ziterdes & Warscape

Around 2006 I made the next try. I had plastic boards from Ziterdes (Germany) and from Warscape (UK, company and website seem to have vanished) in my shop. They did not sell well and so I decided to give them a try. But both did not make me happy.

My gaming table with six Ziterdes terrain boards.
This setup is 120 x 180cm wide.

Half ready table based on 50 x 50cm Warscape boards.

Both sets had problems:

1. They were made of vacuum formed plastic, hollow on the underside and edges a little bit rounded. The hollow bottom led to the problem that the large thin plastic surfaces bobbed very easily.
   
   
2. They were very light, so they slipped quickly.
   
   
3. Handling the pieces caused bending them and that led to litter falling of. 
   
   
4. Setting up large tables was difficult because the boards had to be connected beforehand, which only worked good in theory. It was not easy to connect them AND then put them on the table. For completeness : The Warscape boards had holes and were supplied with plastic screws. That was better then the clamps from Ziterdes.
   
   
5. Ziterdes boards had cobblestones on the bridge and on the city piece. Because the vacuum forming process did not allow very fine details these stones had a size where miniatures would not stand very well.
   
   
6. The Warscape system had another serious fault. The river was nearly useless. There was only one and you could not build a consecutive river. It was only suitable as a river in a corner. I remember talking on the phone with the saleswoman from Warscape to explain the problem. She was surprised, they had not run into it. Seems they had never setup a real gaming table where the river runs from one side to the opposite side...
   
   
7. Last but nor least : Both system were expensive. With a little bit of knowledge it is possible to build landscape boards like that for a fraction of the money. And everybody could see this and that was also a reason for the bad sales.
   
   

The Warscape river piece. (Picture from the website.)

Ziterdes boards. I hated the cobblestones.

The Gaming Mat

In between I also made the attempt with a gaming mat. If you haven't lived under a rock during the last years, you may have recognized the gaming mat hype in the wargamer scene. And if not, you can do it now since the net is full of it. The ‚make your own gaming mat‘ hype has paved the way for a new product, today there are a lot printed ones you can buy.

(The idea of gaming mats was not new. GeoHex also sold game mats: green with or without hexgrid or space and sea mats.)

In my case it was a mat based on sturdy awning fabric, covered with a mixture of sand, acrylic paste and paint. Provided with litter and dry brushed in the end. Visually, the result was not bad.

The mat. On this photo still fixed to the table for drying.

Unfortunately the mat had some serious flaws. The worst was that the thing lost a huge amount of crumbs, so that every use ended also in a bigger cleaning action. It pelted and dusted so extreme that the stuff covered not only the floor but also chairs, clothes, etc. At some point that really becomes annoying.

To make it worse, I wanted to use a very old technique for the production of the grass and litter. You may have read about it somewhere. It‘s simple: collect used tea, dry it and then use it as litter. I did that and it didn't seem bad at first. A lot of ‚flock‘ for no money. But Mr. Stupid (me) also used leftovers of fennel tea and these leftovers had decided to smell forever. So the mat ended rolled up in a niche behind a cupboard, collapsed more and more, trickled down a lot of litter and evaporated a light but annoying herbal smell... Came the day when I had enough and the thing was removed. Another ‚experiment‘ for the bin.

Yes, I admit it, the fennel thing was my fault. But not the crumbling. We made it exactly like one of these internet-youtube-busybodies described it. But who knows, maybe their living rooms look a lot different than mine (and yours) and crumbles on the floor and everywhere don‘t count anymore. 

By the way : One would think that mats like this are easy to store and you can make a lot of them. Forget it. With all the stuff on the surface it became very 'fat'. Mine was 160 x 160 cm, it had a diameter of about 25-30 cm and it was much heavier than you would expect.

The new beginning

About two years ago I decided that I needed a new gaming table. And that I wanted something very stable. Something to end all the experiments. And I wanted to manage campaigns on gridded maps and do battles based on a grid system. (I will explain that in another post.)

First of all I had to build a frame. And it looks like this:

Its a frame made of 4 parts that is a little bit bigger than our dining table and that has a space inside of 1 x 2 meters. The area inside is covered with (green) blackboard paint so that I can draw scenarios with chalk when I want to do a quick and dirty setup. The bars and screws are there to connect the parts with each other and the partially felt covered bars also keep the whole thing in position.

I know, it reminds us of a football field or the like. The border was painted black and white with antique maps in mind and was meant to be a kind of ruler for a 10cm grid. 

Yes, it looks kind of silly and I will paint it new.

And I made inlets covered with felt that I glued on hardboard and that were dry brushed with green and brown colors.

And there I am now. Time to pimp it up...

Midsomer murders terrain

In the Mail today: 2 more mags for my collection. One got a bit too much moisture, and is a bit wrinkled, the other one was bent because the seller did not care when he stuffed it into the envelope. (Thanks mate...)

On a backside I found an ad for 'beginners terrain'. The midsomer murders version: a pub, a farm and lots of hedges. (see part list on the left) First comes the pub. Priorities. (June 1999 if you are wondering)

Prince August French Artillery - Part 4 - Finally ready

The first thing we notice when we see the 54mm artillery moulds from Prince August is that the soldiers are wearing a headgear that we don't expect.  In fact, the uniform regulations of the French army changed every few years at that time and the Prince August moulds show us figures with a hat that the artillerymen (and a lot of the other troops) wore in the first years of the 19th century. According to Knötel the shako was introduced in 1810 for the french artillery. 

But that's not a problem, because the heads are loose and interchangeable. If you want to represent the later period or the guard artillery, you will find the heads for them in the moulds of the Imperial Guard and the Line Infantry of the same series.

But since this headgear was widely used in the period, it is good that we can make them. One can use them with a little adaptation and some parts from other moulds for completely different regiments or nations. In general, you should look very carefully at the parts in this mould series: there are numerous possibilities for modifications and combinations.

The Uniform

I had a problem there. While the pictures of the french artillerymen of that time are roughly all very similar, they are often very different in the details. To make it harder, many artists concentrated more on the later years of the Napoleonic Empire, the earlier years are often missed out.

This illustration (from the Vinkhuizen collection) shows a naval artilleryman from 1796. Looks very similar to our figures. But in the time of the Empire the cockade on the hat had changed - the revolution was over. And the soldier in this picture wears the gaiters like the light infantry. Or specific short ones for the Navy where heavy boots and long gaiters would have been not so useful or needed. But what you can see: our moulds here can also produce figures from the time of the revolution.

And then I found this detail. It explicitly shows the skirt and hat of the uniform in 1806. What caught my eye were the blue shoulder straps, which I found in other depictions always in red. So I'll stick with red. That simply looks better. But it could be wrong, who knows.

It took me a very long time to finish this group. Half-finished figures normally do not stand around for so long on my painting table. But I was busy elsewhere and as you can read on my other blog, my health was also an issue. But now it's done and I am back in the saddle again.

I ended up with 4 cannons, a 4-man crew per cannon and 2 officers. I resisted the temptation to do each of the 6 different figures as a crew for each cannon. That would have been too much. Given my space and the gaming table size, I couldn't not use much more. But if some should be needed later: the moulds are still there.

This was the last group of figures that needed to be painted. The cannons were ready many weeks ago, but unfortunately I missed posting something or even just photographing them. Therefore, unfortunately, we only see the end result here.