Gamer's Eye View of the City

Merry Christmas!  My own little gift to you is a few shots of my completed cityscape.  Check this bad boy out.  Nine square feet of battleground ready for armies of little plastic warriors.  Of course, if you have more table to fill, and you have a ice gray drop cloth, you could put 4-inches of space between each city block and have a full 4-foot by 4-foot table.  How cool is that?

Pleasant parks, seedy industrial districts, this town has it all.

That big building looks massive centered like that.

The great thing about this set-up is that I managed to avoid a table full of open site lines along the north-south and east-west directions.  Between the angles building supports and sewage plant, there are enough angles that you can't just plunk a heavy machine gun in the center and prevent your enemy from moving out of one corner of the city.

The unified paint scheme ties everything together well.  Here
you can see the ladders used for accessing levels.

I don't recommend playing on the patio.  I had to run
from the rain half-way through taking these photos.

A maze of sight-lines keeps things far more interesting.

You might be wondering how I can justify calling a big setup like this 'portable'.  Just wait until tomorrow...

Four Square Feet of City

As a Christmas present to myself, I completed the holiday preparations early enough that I could devote a few hours to finish up the big cityscape.  So here they are, the last four blocks of the city-scape.

The round thing in  the back is some sort of modern concrete
sculpture/ nice place to snipe from.  There's a fountain  tucked away
behind the building right next to that concrete thingy.

Here's the detail of that fountain/sculpture.  You'll be able
to see how it fits  into the rest of the boards when I post
 a shot of the finished city.

Two of the biggest buildings in the city.  The one on the left
is the tallest, and the one on the right helps to break
up all the 90-degree angle sight-lines on the board.

Tune in tomorrow for shots of the whole nine-square-feet of city laid out in all its glory.  And Merry Christmas!

Home Stretch

Remember way back in October when I hoped to have this city table done by year's end?  I'm not quite done, and it's not quite the end of the year.

The paint streaks show up in these photos more than they do in real life.  They are also way too shiny.  On the other buildings, the dull cote and better lighting tones those down.  All that's left to be done is the dull cote.  That'll probably have to wait for Christmas Eve, though.  That needs to be done in the day light hours, and that means a Saturday job.

Big Project Blues

The problem with big projects like city scapes is that you do so many repetitions of the same work.  Take these shots, for instance:

Two more buildings base coated and ready for The Dip.  But we've seen this before, haven't we.  The only real new thing in this shot is the tablecloth, and nobody's coming to a wargame blog for a tablecloth show.  (Yes, yes, unless we're talking about a table cloth that makes a good terrain drop cloth.  Work with me here people.)

At this point this blog is more like a wargame version of those weight loss blogs:  Here look, I've lost another pound.  Whoop-de-doo.  Call me when you're ready for your close up for Mr. DeMille.  Well, I'm still four completed city blocks away from that.  Just bear with me and hopefully we'll get this bad boy knocked out and up on Ebay before the end of the year.

The Promised Land: Work In Progress

Just as promised yesterday, I've got the first of a series of work in progress posts for all you faithful reader out there.  Most of the work here was accomplished over the weekend:

The brown portions of the ground here were primed, a little sand added, and then primed again to seal in the sand.  I used the same shade of brown as used on the other boards so that they'll blend in (almost) seamlessly.

It ain't pretty yet, but it's progress.

An Itch Not Fully Scratched

Wha-hey!  Guess who still has the gumption to slap some paint around?  That's right, it's your old pal, Warren.

Check it, peeps, the public utilities board is totes complete:

It's a little light on cover, but it's the heaviest board in the box. So it should be rugged enough to withstand plenty of play time.  The ground isn't nearly as shiny as it appears in that last shot.  The black windows were left that shiny on purpose, though.  I think it makes them look more like security camera covers.

Now I've just got to sand, prime, paint, seal, and dullcote four more boards.  Brace yourself for a few work-in-progress posts.

Obligatory Still Kicking Post

If you must, feel free to insert a cliched "not dead yet" joke here. (That's what most bloggers do when they return after an extended absence.)   Instead of that, I'm just going to stick with a meta-not-dead-yet joke instead.

At any rate...here are a couple of shots of the freshly painted pumphouse block.  It needs a coat of black wash to dull it out - it's too bright compared to the rest of the buildings, but a shot of The Dip will fix it up just fine.

It might seem silly to prime those blue plastic electric boxes in preparation for painting them a slightly different shade of blue, but this shade matches the blue in the rest of the buildings on the table.  This helps the overall visual appeal of the neighborhood and helps tie everything together.

I considered painting the buildings a nice industrial green, but that wouldn't work well with the green sludge pond.  I could have gone with blue water in the sludge pond, but The Dip would have made it look too muddy for my taste.  So here we are - blue buildings and green sludge make the pump house a less dull boy.