Mini Gaming Boards

After the success of the Goblin Quest game, I've been looking at making a small gaming board to use when playing with my oldest son. The two 2'x4' gaming boards I have at home are a bit unwieldy and to be honest, after eight years, I'm not too keen on their look anymore.

Instead, I nicked an idea from the excellent Realm of Chaos 80s blog and used two cork pin boards as a base. These were bought at IKEA and cost 40 SEK (roughly £3.50) each. They measure some 40 cm by 60 cm, giving a total playing area of about 80x60 cm – perfect for some quick games on the kitchen table.

VÄGGIS pin board from IKEA.
Not very exciting, but cheap and sturdy.

I filled the interior of the pin boards by gluing down sheets of foam board. The sheets were 5 mm thick, but since the depression was a bit smaller than this (approx. 4 mm) I chamfered the edges. Filler was then used to smooth out the transition and the small lip on the frame. (In hindsight it probably would have been easier to just slap on the filler around the frame without cutting the foam board first.)

The edges of the foam board
were chamfered to fit the frames.

Once the filler was dry, I glued on the sand using a mix of different types to get some interesting variety. Watered down PVA glue was then used to fix the sand more firmly in place and stop it from rubbing off later. 

The sand glued in place.

The sand had a mid-brown tone, so to get a nice natural effect I applied an undercoat in the form of a dark brown wash. This was just some artist's acrylic paint heavily diluted with water. I went back and added more wash to certain parts, to get a more varied look.

When the undercoat/wash was dry I did some drybrushing, mixing in some light tan into the original brown. I kept the drybrushing very light, as I wanted a dark, earthy look, like a forest floor. However, after the drybrushing it still looked a bit too bright, so I did a new wash to tone it down.

Happy with this look it was now on to the flocking.

The painted boards.

Once again, I wanted a varied, natural look so I mixed three types of ground cover: Woodland Scenics green blend fine turf, Woodland Scenics earth fine turf and a dark green flock from Javis. I applied this in patches, leaving a path in the middle of the boards, as I thought it looked good.

First coat of flock added.

When the first coat was done, I sprayed the boards with watered-down glue and added some lighter flock (Javis mid green flock) in various spots, to get some colour variations. This got another overspray of watered down glue to fix it all in place.

I had originally planned to stop here, as I wanted the boards to be able to handle some rough going – kids you know! However, looking over the boards I couldn't help thinking they looked a bit flat and uninteresting. So after rummaging through my stash of basing materials, I found some coarse turf that also went on the boards. Satisfied with this new look, all that was left was another coat of water-glue mix to fix it all down, and to paint the edges black to tidy it all up.

The finished boards with some lighter flock
and coarse turf added.

Close-up of the surface.

Some models to show the scale. 

I couldn't resist setting up some terrain. 

That's more like it – a proper mystical forest to explore!

We haven't had a chance to try out the boards yet, but hopefully it won't be too long!

A Forest

Or the start of one at least!

For years I have looked in envy at the wonderful trees adorning many a British wargaming table. I was quite taken by the look of them – they looked so much better than the usual bottle-cleaner trees or the boring samey ones from Woodland Scenics.

After some research, I found out these trees seemed to be made by the same manufacturer, Last Valley Terrain. At Salute last year, I had the chance to see and admire the products up close, but due to the limited space in my suitcase, a purchase was not possible.

Rubberised horsehair – the magic stuff!

Instead I perused the Net for suitable tutorials and then promptly ordered some rubberised horsehair (it's not really horsehair these days though, more like organic fibres from coconuts or something), grabbed some of my Woodland Scenics tree armatures, a bottle of cheap hairspray and got to work.

This was my method:

1. Remove any mould lines from the WS tree armatures and then twist them into the desired shapes.
2. Glue to bases.
3. Wetbrush mid/dark grey on the stems. Don't be too neat as a sloppy job just makes them look more natural.
4. Wash with a dark brown wash, eg AP Strong Tone.
5. Drybrush original mid/dark grey.
6. Light drybrush with lighter grey.
7. Tear off chunks in various sizes from the rubberised horsehair and tease these apart. 
8. Paint some wood/PVA glue on the branches and then wind/stretch the rubberised horsehair over them. Leave to dry.
9. If the rubberised horsehair still looks flat in some places, tease it apart as best as you can.
10. Spray the rubberised horsehair with a generous amount of cheap (and sticky!) hairspray and pour your preferred flock over the tree. For my trial I used WS fine turf green blend. Wait for a while then shake of excess flock. 
11. Spray heavily with more hair spray over the newly attached flock. Then spray some more.
12. Wait an hour or more then do another heavy spray.
13. Snip off any straggly bits of the rubberised horsehair with some scissors.
14. Finish off the base in your preferred manner.
15. Optional: The hairspray I used dried with a satin sheen. While this was not apparent on the turf, it did show on the stems. A couple of quick sprays with AP Anti-shine took care of this.

And there you have it!

These were all made very quickly as a test and I think they came out rather nice for a first try but of course there's always room for improvements. I learned a couple of important lessons from this trial, eg to try and tease the rubberised horsehair apart, to make it less flat. You can see some parts were I didn't do this enough and it makes the tree look a bit unnatural.

However, the major misstake was the bases. I mounted the trees on 5 mm foamcore but made the bases much too small and this made the trees very wobbly. When I realised this, I glued washers under the bases for some extra weight and this helped to some extent though they're still a bit unstable. I'm planning to do another batch and for these I'm looking at using 1 or 2 mm plastic card for the bases, and making sure to do them a bit larger than these first ones.

In the next batch, I will also experiment with adding some roots made from putty and vary the colours on both the stems and the foliage for a more natural look. I have an idea to make some birch trees as I think a grove of these would look really nice on the gaming table!

Have a great weekend everyone and thank you very much for reading!

Snow Bases

Right now I'm working on the first unit for my Novgorod force for the Baltic Crusades project. Yes, they've been a long time coming for sure. As Dalauppror has already done both his armies with winter bases, of course I'm going to do the same.

There are a lot of tutorials out there for snow bases, as a quick search will show you, but most are variations of a few different recipies. Having never done a snow themed army, I wanted to test a couple of techniques and find the one that suited me best in terms of minimal work (I'm lazy ...) and best look (... but also want my army to look good).

So, armed with some glue and Army Painter's snow flock I set to work. I decided to try out 5 different techniques, and in the picture below you can see the results (click for a bigger view).

The "recipies" for the bases were:
A: Snow flock sprinkled over Woodland Scenics Scenic Cement.
B: Carpenter's glue and snow flock, mixed 1-1.
C: Carpenter's glue, snow flock and water, mixed 1-1-0,5.
D: Carptenter's glue, snow flock, water and light grey paint (Foundry Arctic Grey A). When dry drybrushed with white.
E: Carpenter's glue and snow flock, mixed 1-1. When still wet, snow flock was sprinkled on top.

Here you can see some close ups of the bases (click for even bigger close ups).

The verdicts?

A: This is great for that light, freshly fallen snow look. However, as the flock is not secured it will fall/rub off easily. A drop or two of Scenic Cement will take care of that though.
B: Looks good with a slightly "icy" look. It was a bit hard to apply the mix, as it would rather stay stuck to the cocktail stick I used than stick to the base.
C: Looks a lot like B, but maybe a bit less "icy". The addition of water made it easier to apply than B.
D: This one didn't come out the way I thought – it doesn't look like snow! Also, it's the most time consuming method of the ones I tried. Not a winner.
E: This is perhaps my favourite. It combines the best bits from A and B – it looks convincingly like a thick carpet of freshly fallen snow. Nice.

My idea for the look of the army, was that the novgorodians are on a campaign in the middle of the winter, and so the bases should have lots of snow and not much (if any) vegetation. Thus I will probably use the E variant, but will add some water to make the mix a little easier to apply and also secure the top snow with a drop of Scenic Cement.

Hopefully the first novgorodian unit will be finished soon, and I can post some pictures of it here.

Finally, a warm welcome to my new followers Christopher(aka Axebreaker) and Sean. I hope you'll like the blog!

Have a great weekend everybody, especially those of you going to Salute! I'm not at all jealous of you, oh no ...

Fatigue/Casualty Markers

Inspired by Sidney Roundwood (pop over to his blog, it really is excellent) I knocked together a couple of quick Fatigue markers for SAGA. Of course, they can also be used as casualty markers for other games.

The miniatures are Gripping Beast casualties. The sculpts are a little rough but certainly adequate for this job. I glued them to 40 mm round MDF bases from the great people at Warbases, and then carved the dice holders out of pink styrofoam. After this photo was taken I realised I had used a big 12 mm dice as a template instead of the micro 7 mm I intended. It was however very easy to shave off the styrofoam and start over.

I used Windsor & Newton mineral texture gel to blend the styrofoam holders into the bases. This stuff smells absolutely vile, kind of like ammonia, and is a quite fiddly to get into the hard to reach spots (eg near the miniatures). It turned out just "OK" in the end, with some visible gaps around the figures, and it don't think I will use the gel for this kind of work in the future.

After the basing gel was dry I undercoated the markers black and painted them in my usual way. Finally I applied a coat of gloss and then matt varnish, before finishing them off with some grass tufts.

Here is a close up of some of the markers. For easier identification, I painted four of then red and four of them blue. The micro dice are from The Dice Shop – great prices and very fast shipping.

As always, thanks for reading!