Road to Messina: Building the gaming table
Lemming and me worked hard on a new gaming table this weekend, since our girls had something different to do and let the boys play.
Layout test with test buildings view from the hill side
Road leading through the village
View from the dale
Let it snow, let it snow
A wire brush is an excellent tool for carving Styrodur
Layout before filling, the construction can be seen easily
The small river can be seen on the left side
Smoothing the gaps with filler
On the right side a cart track leads up the hill
Fieldstone terraces
Whole layout
A quite good result after two afternoons.
I started with my concept a few month ago with some internet research and some scetches. As usual I fogot both at home and we had to work without that visual inspiration.
I told Lemming about my concept and he made some really good changes to my initial plan, so that the board should fit for really good Flames of War games. I wanted to have a small sicilian village with a church as center piece with some forest hills around it. Moreover I wanted to have several roads in order to speed up gaming with vehicles. The position of the hills and the tiny river should provide a lot of cover as the village, the planned villa and the two farms will do. Lemming improved the concepts with some additional streets, some more curves, different hill layout and more. I really like team work!
The table will be presented on the Hamburgian Tactica in February 2008.
We began to glue the Styrodur to 3mm hardboard. Then we built the hills with four layers of 2cm Styrodur. The design conference and the cutting and glueing of the main layout took us one evening i.e. approx. 4 hours. Afterwards we made some tests with buildings of our gaming club.
On the second day we used knifes and wire brushes to build decent downhill grades and the streets. The wire grades were a tip by Decebalus, which proofed to be an excellent but messy tool. Thanks a lot for that.
After cleaning the room we continued with using body filler to level out the hills. I tried with a small piece to build rocks with filler using a scraper when the filler almost dried. The test was very successful, so we will add some rocks in the next step.
Frank Bauer and Lemming told me about building small field stone walls out of cat litter. That was an excellent tip and we built some terraces in the hill for the village with this technik. I think I will build the bridge with a similar technik, too.
To be continued
