End of the Box

To fantasy up the four small wargame boxes, I needed something with a touch of magic.  Hence four wizard towers.  Yeah, they all look a little different.  So do the ponds and the houses and the woods.  And most of the figures.  It's nice - they all have that personal touch that turns this from another boxed game to a personalized gift from a friend.

 

So that's a total of eight terrain items and fifteen inches of hedges.  Not a bad little setup.  The really nice thing about this setup is that the colors are so garish.  That sounds odd until you consider the purpose of the setup.  Visual appeal might be everything, but this set will be shown via lo-res webcam, so to keep things straight, the pieces really need to jump off the battlemat.  For the terrain, the water is bright, the tower has red splashes, the house is a bright yellow, and the forest has that nice dark shadow.  When used for actual play, it will be a lot easier to recognize these pieces that if I had made the usual attempt to closely match ground color to terrain base color.

Of course, now I'm starting to wonder if my figures
are going to show up at all.  Something to consider...

And here it all is boxed up and ready for storage.  The figures are stuffed in a plastic box under the broken ground.  With a drop cloth and a little bit of newspaper, this bad boy should make it half way around the world with no problems.

Four Ponds and a Dropcloth

Scroll up to see what the bland, tan drop cloths used to look like.  They each cost a buck and half at the local Wal-Mart.  I found them in a bin full of quilting squares and they were the perfect size, but were basic fabric, so I had my crafty wife sew up the edges to keep them from fraying.

 

 

 I also threw together four ponds.  They are just MDF with sand glued for land and blue paint for water.  The water got a couple of coats of glossy clear-coat to give them a little shine.

A Hill Worth Dying On

Banged out four quick hills this weekend.  Two layers of 1/2-inch foamcore shaved to size, mounted on useless CDs, and covered with PVC glue and sand makes for an impressive height on which to fight. 

Generally, I prefer to make my hills gentle so that figures can stand anywhere on them. This style of hill provides a binary on-off that suits the needs of the project.  Remember that the goal is a cheap 4-piece setup that will still look good on camera.  By forcing the players to declare "this figure is on the hill", this system should prevent any confusion when playing long-distance games via computer camera.

Now that is a commanding height.  It should also be obvious that this hill blocks line of sight for figures on the ground.  The default assumption is that the centerline of the hill serves a LoS blocker for figures trying to see a wizard standing on the top of the hill.

One last shot of the hill next to the house for scale, and then let's look at a typical terrain set-up.  Here you can see the drop cloths I bought for this project.  The drop cloth needs work, but I thought it might be nice to see how the stream works as a corner cut-off, and how just five terrain items and a little bit of hedging can make for an interesting set-up with lots of tactical decisions.



One of four

Looking at this, I do think each box could use one or two more items of terrain, so that each battle doesn't feel quite so much like the last.  This is a good set-up, but still limited, because you probably need this many pieces for a good game.  It would be nice to swap out a couple of items, too.

[Edit to respond to Sean's comment because Blogger is acting like an idiot and won't let me comment:  They work really well.  Cheap, durable, thin, and consistent in size and shape, they also take PVC glue and sand like a champ.  One word of warning, though, you have to go pretty heavy on the glue and spraycoat primer to completely cover up the shiny rainbows.]

Four Times the Fun

I lied.  In my last post, I promised a big new project for 2018, but after a conversation with a good friend, I tabled that big complex for something a little more intimate and a lot more likely to see some actual gaming time.

 

Behold!

 

The start of a big new small project

What you're looking at here is the start of a new terrain system built for 10mm skirmishing.  Right now the shoe-box sized system has just four small terrain items.  As you can see, we have a bit of broken ground, a small house with six 2.5-inch hedge pieces, a small wood, and a stream.  The round terrain pieces are based on CDs, and the stream on 1/4-inch MDF.  The stream has both a bridge on the left and a ford on the right, and the odd angles to either side allow this piece to be placed on the corner of the terrain mat (forthcoming).

 

 

The house is a small, wooden, children's toy block.  The kind with the raised and painted letters on the side.  I trimmed down the corners a bit and fixed cardstock to the front and back, then used balsa strips for trim and cut pieces of towel for the roof. A small woodpile and some bushes add a 'lived in' look to the small hut.

 

Here's the kicker.  I'm building four of these sets.

 

While clearing out some older unused wargame items, I realized that I could break up my collection of 10mm fantasy figures into four identical groups of figures.  Why am I doing this?  You can probably guess, but I'm not giving the full reveal because I don't want to spoil the surprise.

Stay tuned, loyal readers, it's going to be a great year for wargaing.

They Blew It Up!

Those damn dirty alien-apes!  Damn them to alien-hell!

If only this came with a liberty-torch.

So this terrain piece is painted and ready for the table.  It hovers somewhere on the edge of difficult and impassable terrain.  The precise nature will likely depend on the scenario.  Either way, it blocks line of sight and adds a little more visual interest to the set-up.

The alien-Ozymandias - look upon his works ye mighty and despair!

 I toyed with the idea of painting the eyes a brilliant green, but didn't want to ruin the 'fallen statue' effect.

Note the sci-fi figure for scale - guess who's figures came in the mail?

On a side note: Welcome and thanks to all of you who have recently started following this blog.  Watching the number of followers creep slowly upwards is very rewarding.  Thanks also to those of you who hav eposted encouragement in the comments of recent posts.  I read every one of them even if I don't respond.  As with the followers, your comments are part of what keeps this little blog of little men trundling along.

Close Encounter of the Second Kind

"Visual sightings of aliens or physical effects on animate and inanimate objects."  Starting a blog post with a definition, how lame.  Hopefully the rest of the post makes up for it.

It's no secret that Matakishi's Tea House has been inspirational for this sci-fi project, and one of the things I've been promising is an alien artifact-cum-structure like the Face of Boo (as seen near the bottom of this page).  A child sized mask would take up the bulk of a 10mm scale table, so that idea wouldn't work.  Instead, I combed six different stores before finding this little gem in the discount store for the princely sum of two dollars.

I didn't even need a knife or saw for this one, just snapped off the head and limb.  Buried it in a mix of sand and standard white glue, and jammed a bunch of stones into the side of the hill.  That's one alien statue, buried in the sands of time. 

Thought about snapping off the feet and making an extra-terrestrial "Ozymandias", but the feet of this figure are just booted feet - they could be anyone's.  So this will have to do.

The arm helps make this idea my own - does his hand point to a buried tech cache?

Landing Pad - Post-Paint

With this landing pad, I finally pulled the trigger on the whole 'sponsoring megacorp' thing.  This colony is brought to you by the fine folks at Buy 'N Large.  Anybody know where I can find a suitable Wall-E miniature?  Scale doesn't matter, if they are 25mm scale, they'll just serve as Wall-A or even Wall-I mining bots.

There's less to this build than it looks.  Just more random odds and sods.  Thick poster mount for the pad and ramp, bamboo skewers for the struts, and toothpicks for the safety railing.  The tricky part was that walkway up to the landing pad; I cut the width to suit and then just hand trimmed off a few millimeters until I got the length right.  Even at that, the miniatures still slide down to the bottom.  The blue plants and rocks will help it look like it belongs with the rest of the table.

Landing Pad - Pre-Paint

The human colonists now have a way to get on and off planet.  One custom made rocket landing pad with spare fuel tanks, access ramp, and matching rocks and plants to tie it into the rest of the terrain.

Full Table Look-See

For 10mm miniatures, nine square feet of table space is more than enough room for battle.  With a standard six inch move for the fast figures it'll take six full turns to cross the table, not counting detours to avoid terrain.

To keep the colors as consistent as possible, I painted up the eight perimeter tiles in one fell swoop.  To keep the colors bright, I dry brushed the sand white after the dark brown spray paint.  Spots of the white paint remained after drybrushing up the reddish tints, so it looks like this is a cold weather sort of planet what with all the snow tucked into the little nooks and crannies.

As of right now, this table still looks a little too open.  The aliens are going to need more terrain if they want to survive to get into melee with the colonists.  We'll see what else I can cook up.  Maybe a landing pad, more rocks, and more plant life are in order.  And some sort of alien artifact, too.  That could be fun.

10mm Hills - Literally

These hills are 10mm tall - just enough to block line of sight for all but the biggest miniatures.  Rules-wise they block sight for everyone, but this way they'll fit into the one box. They are built of two layers of 5mm foamcore glued together and carved to suit.

The different colors serve to make the hills stand out.  These are 'step type' wargame hills built to accommodate the rules.  In this case, the rules stipulate that you end your movement at a linear barrier, and the base of the hills counts as one.

I actually like the layered look for these hills; it makes them looks like different strata from the surrounding red dirt plains.  Sort of like the sandstone bluffs you see on Old Terra.

Like this - only less dramatic.

Why not?  If you were going to settle on another planet, you'd probably pick a scenic place to build your home, too.

Quick Project

Banged out a quick terrain piece for the alien world last night.  The colonists need some excuse to move into the neighborhood, and this mining outpost gives it to them.

Lot of blank (advertising space on the front of this piece.  Might fill that up with a printed sign for the owner of the outpost.  Most folks go with Weyland-Utani for a game like this.  I'm thinking about going bigger.  How does this look?

That'd be different, and even more creepy.

Again, all found items glued to an old CD.  The main tank is the top of an old deodorant stick, and the big 'resource extraction' pipes are taken from one of my son's toys - the pipes on the right arm of this guy.  

Tell me that flaming cannonball
couldn't be used for all sorts
of interesting pieces of terrain.

The smaller tanks are plastic lids from (long story long today) soil sampling sleeves.  I did mention I'm a geologist, right?  If you keep your eyes open, you can save all sorts of fun plastic bits from the garbage can at your work place.

Small plastic circular bits,
a staple of the bits box.

Again, the piping is bamboo skewers and the door cereal box packaging.  The maintainence boxes are bits of balsa wood cut to size and shape.  Nothing particularly groundbreaking, but hopefully inspirational nonetheless.

Strange New Worlds

You can find a lot of places covered in red dirt on this old blue marble on which we live, so red dirt alone is not enough to convey the idea of an alien world.  For that you need aliens, and not just alien animals.  Alien plants go a long way towards that end as well.  Here are my alien plants:

These were build using an old TerraGenesis trick: melted drinking straws painted up teal.  The craft store sold wide diameter straws that worked great as a thicker diameter more mature plant.  Those plants mean the rocks and such in the following photos won't work on any other terrain setup, but they do a great job tieing all of this terrain together as a set.  And the bright teal sets them off from the surrounding dirt as well.  No question but that we're not in Kansas here.

Fantasy figure for scale, because my sci-fi
figs can't come fast enough.

As with the colony, the rocks are just driveway gravel superglued to old video game CDs.  The white rocks really set them off from the dark red surroundings, and that contrast helps conveny the alien-ness of the place, too.  Speaking as a geologist, it would take some interesting geologic processes to end up with those big bone-white boulders scattered around a red plain of fine sand like that.

Give Me Land, Lots of Land...

...Preferably mineral rich land on an uninhabited planet.  If you can't have that, the 'mineral rich' is more important than the 'unihabited'.  At least for rapacious human colonists.  To that end I picked up more 12-inch square boards to build a modular terrain setup for some tabletop sci-fi action.  At the 10mm scale, a two or three foot square setup should do it.  With one board left at home, another eight should od the trick. 

[Note to self: Craft board 3mm thick is so thin it warps no matter how long you press it.  Also, it doesn't work with the colony you built on 5mm thick craft board.  Back to the hardware store for me.]

In the meantime, here is the home base for the 10mm colonists and marines, built entirely out of found items.

For your inspiration, here's a list of what became what:

• The three small hab modules consist of 15mm tall plastic lids with the tops of dishwashing soap containers glued on top.
• The top of the round two story building is likewise a dishsoap cap.  The middle (UFO-shaped) part of that building is an empty car freshener, and the base is two empty tape dispenser rolls. 
• The garage is the plastic container for a printer ink cartridge capped with a superglue lid (smokestack) and toy dispender dome.  The radio dish and other machinery attached to the garage is parts from a cut up action figure assault rifle.
• The security perimeter is disposable razor handles and more round caps from...long story short, they're found items.
• Windows and doors are cereal box cardboard, and cables are pieces of bamboo skewer.
• The rocks are rocks.  Driveway gravel to be precise.  Sometimes you can't beat nature. 

Small supply dump with drums and crates in
the lower right corner.

Tape dispenser, car air freshener, and dish
soap cap - space age building materials.

Sci-fi Terrain Boards

With all that rule nonsense out of the way, we can talk about the other fun stuff like figures and terrain. As always, I'm looking to keep it cheap and contained in a single "under the bed" style plastic tub.  That means 10mm figures, found items, and terrain boards. 

For father's day I'm hoping for a slew of Pendraken sci-fi figures.  (Read: I'm hoping not to get in trouble when the wife learns that I dropped more money on a slew of Pendraken sci-fi figures.)  The colonial marines and not-Alien aliens have caught my eye, and I've even banged out a simple convention style set of rules that fit on a 4x6 notecard.

Since those will take a fair few weeks to get here, let alone paint, might as well start banging out the terrain for them. First up is the colonist's base, made up entirely of found items.

The baseboard is 5mm thick craft board and is roughly 12" by 12".  It's the last one left - the hardstore sells these for fifty cents, but you've gotta time it right.  Hopefully, I'll be able to buy five more for hills and open land.  

This stuff is all built for the 10mm scale.  I'll include figures for scale after I get the right figures painted up. See if you can figure out what materials were used here, and I'll give you the full inventory when they are painted.  (Ooooo, look at the clever blogger, using a cheap cliff-hanger to score a few extra hits.)

Dollar Trees

Not the stores, the miniature wargaming product that you can find in the diorama section of hobby and craft stores.  Ten sturdy plastic trees for around twelve dollars ain't a bad price. Check out this little gem:

Toob Trees - 10 hard plastic trees for ten bucks.

The scale on these things is great.  Here's a shot with some previously showcased figures:

Thumbs up in my book, but I might have to give them an ink wash to add in some shading.  Those fall foliage trees look too cartoonish.