How to make a Commands and Colors hex mat (New Zealand version)

Many moons ago I posted a piece here on how to make a hex mat. 

Unfortunately, I was not able to bring that mat with me to New Zealand, and for six years I have been without a suitable sward on which to play the glorious game Commands & Colors: Ancients. Attempts to obtain a mat here have produced mixed results. I ordered a commercial version which never arrived; I tried making a dodgy off-set squares mat of my own. 

It seemed fate had dealt me a lousy hand. Would I ever play Commands & Colors: Ancients in the proper way again?

Well, last weekend I got notification through my phone of a sale at a store called Spotlight. It's where New Zealanders go when they want to get a relatively affordable set of curtains, a duvet cover, bits and pieces for sewing. Who could resist a 60% off sale on such potentially useful household items? So in I wandered to have a look at their tasteful net curtains and fabrics. Lo and behold: they had some lovely off-green felt, 90cm deep. 

There was a stirring in my soul. 

I asked for a piece 160cm long, and another 10cm long. This would allow hexes c.10cm from flat to flat 13 wide and 9 deep, as in the classic Commands and Colors configuration, as well as a scrap piece for experimentation.

Tools:

Cutting board, leather hole punch (or similar), straight-edge rulers, tape measure, marking dots, marker pen. 

Method:

Print off a template on A4 paper using a hex map generator. With this particular one the 'hexagon size' is the length of each hexside. 6cm gave me two hexes on a sheet of A4 with 10.4cm flat-to-flat, 12cm point-to-point. 

Mine printed too small initially - I had to increase the PDF size to 110% to be able to print the correct dimensions on paper. 

Use the leather punch to make a guide hole at each point of the two hexes.

With this initial template, mark out a larger template on cardboard, punch out the points, and on two of the hexes punch out the centre point as well. I used an opened out artist's wallet as I could get 4.5/5 x 5 hexes on it with the cardboard being easy to punch out but still being sturdy enough to do the job.  

Lay out the felt. 

Using tape measure and rulers, find the centre point of the fabric. Mark it with a dot sticker. Line up this sticker with the centre dot from your hex template and align the template with the fabric edge. 

Before you commence marking the dots on the fabric with your permanent marker, use a scrap piece of the fabric to test for sharpness, smudges, optimal pen size, etc. Better to do this now than risk it on the actual sheet. 

I tried a couple of colours, pen thicknesses and hex designs until I found the ones I liked best.

Returning to the mat, start marking the dots, being careful to make sure everything aligns as well as possible. 

I found out that perfection here is the enemy of the good. The fabric I had was 88cm deep in the centre and 90cm deep at one end. It looks terrible to our wargamerly OCD eyes at this stage when we are dot marking, but if you have fabric bunch or stretch it is better to have the hexes consistent with one another and excess fabric at the edges than to try to keep all the edges consistent and end up with misshapen hexes.

If the hexes are neat and even it will look good, even if the alignment with the edges turns out to have a bit of a slope to it. 

Once you have marked out the hex points, get your straight rule and start drawing the lines, being careful not to smudge them or lose concentration and draw a dud line. This is where you need to be accurate, but be accurate to your marked hex points, not to overall alignments. You will have some distortion and the lines will not be perfect. Accept that: just make sure that you are connecting your points as perfectly as you can and the effect will be good.

If, like me, you often enjoy a tipple while pursuing wargamerly ends, this is not the time to be working your way through half a bottle of vodka. You do not want to be having accidents with your permanent marker!

Stage one hex sides drawn. The lines are horribly out of alignment with one another, but you only notice this as you are marking it, not when you step back and look at the whole effect. Trust the process!

Continue marking the hex sides. Again, be accurate at the hex points so that the connections are clean. This is more important than getting geometric proportions exact. 

Stage two underway.

Once you get to the third stage, you will get a surge of joy.

Now it all comes together!

Keep going and you end up with something like this:

And then you can start playing! 

Including markers, this cost the princely sum of $15.00.

Matters small

I had some nice news from Japan recently. One of the little traditions that developed over my time there was to put on an annual game (usually around Christmas time) and invite along members of the local foreign community who might be interested in trying something different. We had a number of successful days and it was a good way for people to get to know others who weren't necessarily in their usual circle of acquaintances.

Anyway, I heard recently that a few of the lads had decided to start getting together to play Dungeons and Dragons. I am devoid of evangelical zeal when it comes to matters gaming (and am opposed to the idea that we should be out there flapping our arms in an attempt to draw others to the light) but it was nice to hear that they felt starting a game group was a worthwhile thing to do.

In other small matters, on one of the wargaming facebook pages there was a how-to video posted by a fellow who makes 2mm ancient armies from scratch. Well done that man!

Finally, leaving small matters behind, huge congratulations to the Argentine rugby team for yesterday defeating the All Blacks for the first time. As much as it pained me to watch it unfold, it was a victory thoroughly deserved! 

Baggage

These figures (foot are Essex, not sure about the mules) were generously sent my way by the strong right arm of Simon Miller (Bigredbat), putter-on of spectacular multiplayer ancients games, all round top bloke and author of To The Strongest!

I'm not usually one to muck around too much with bases, but I thought I would try to go a bit fancier than usual for these.

To help me in future, I'm including a little reminder of what I did.

1) Paint the figures!

2) Set some puddles using larger stones and apply a mix of fish tank sand and glue.

3) Next, paint sand with a mix of watery earth brown, followed by a drybrush.

4) Apply glue. Pour flock on...

5) Shake flock off.

6) Add a couple of foliage clumps and dribble Klear over the water holes.

This was a lot of fun to do. Thanks again, Simon!

Quick and easy disruption/casualty markers

I recently made some disruption markers to fit in with the terrain for my January project game.  The rules required two types of disorder marker, so I decided to try out an idea I had.

Step one: buy a 100 pack of plastic screw covers at the hardware store (¥380).

Step two: divide them into two sets, drilling one hole in the first set of forty, and two holes in the second set of sixty.

Step three: cut thin wire into lengths that approximate the arrow and javelin sizes for the scale you are using.

Step four: insert these lengths into the holes and glue in place, taking care that the screw covers will sit flat.

Screw tops drilled, some with 'javelins' inserted and glued.

Step five: take long sip of beer, and another for good measure.

The tools of the trade...

Step six: spray paint all in a suitable dark green.

Step seven: paint javelins / arrows brown.

Step eight: apply flock, avoiding getting it on the javelins themselves, as far as possible.

Flock and spray paint of choice.

Step nine: put on table as needed.

In theory...

Step ten: have another sip of beer (it was the holiday season, after all!).

So there you have it, markers in nine easy steps - or seven if you omit the beer and the playing!  

I was not sure how they'd look, but they ended up being functional, easy to handle and durable.  They were easy to see without sticking out like a sore thumb, so they were about what I wanted in a marker.

  

Done!

Any comments or suggestions for improvements most welcome. 

Trebia in miniature with Lost Battles. Video reports.

I recently played through a couple of refights of Trebia using Lost Battles, with the idea being to video the games as pseudo-instructional efforts.

I gave it two goes, and while the second effort is far superior to the first, it's still very long, and contains a mistake which, although not game-breaking, got me annoyed with myself.  Given the number of times I've played the system you'd think I'd be able to count correctly!   Grrrr! 

Still, it's too much of a mission to remake it again just on account of that, so I've posted it, error and all.

I daresay that my droning voice and ubiquitous use of 'so' as a transitional tool will drive any viewers up the wall, but I'll put the videos up here anyway.  Feel free to let me know what you think.  I have plenty of soap and water to wash the filth off, so don't hold back! 

Part 1:  Introduction.

Part 2:  Deployment turn.

Part 3: Turn 2.

Part 4: Turn 3.

Part 5: Turn 4.

Part 6: Turn 5.

Part 7: Turn 6.

Part 8: Turn 7 and wrap.

Lost Battles instructional videos.

Here are some instructional videos I put together some time ago as an introduction to Lost Battles.  They were done on the fly and are pretty amateur but may be of some use to some, I hope!

Part one:

Part two:

Part three:

Part four:

How to make a quick and nasty hex mat for miniatures

A visitor to the blog, Sean, recently asked how I'd made my hex mat for the Commands and Colors:Ancients games I occasionally play, so I promised to put up a few pictures.

First, the materials.  I got the largest cork bulletin board you could find at the hardware store.  This one is 1200 x 800mm.  If you have a table of the correct size you can just use that instead.

Get some cheap, thin, non-patterned carpet.  Make sure it has a matted rather than ridged texture.  You can use any beige, green or brown colour that takes your fancy, but as you're going to spray paint it the closer it is to the colour you want the more economical it will be.  You can get loads of this type of carpet in Japan.

Cut it to the size of your bulletin board (or tabletop).

Pick up some spray paint in suitable colours to create a patchy effect.  I used about seven different sprays on a very light coloured carpet.

Note: these are not the exact colours I used.  There were about two more shades of brown...

Finally, get a dark green stain (I used wood stain) to use for the border.  This step is optional.

Next, the process.

1) Make up a hex template.  I did this by printing out hexes to the specifications I wanted (87mm from flat to flat) on paper, taping these to a piece of scrap plywood, and then drilling out the hex intersections to create the template.

2) Use a brown marker to dot the hex corners on the carpet itself and use a straight rule to mark in the hex sides.

3) Spraypaint the carpet to create whichever mottled colour effect pleases you.  I quite like the 'start out light and build up to dark' method but it uses a lot of paint - so much in fact that it would probably have been just as economical to buy a mat from Hotz.  If I were doing it again I'd use a light green base carpet and just add browns, yellows, and darker green.  It's possibly cheaper in paint to start out darker and lighten it with yellows and lighter greens.  However you do it, once you are happy with the look, you may have to redraw some hexsides that got lost under the paint.

4) [Optional] Paint in the border areas using stain.  This takes a few coats as the carpet doesn't like taking the stain very much and - depending on how picky you are - you may find yourself wanting to touch it up again after a few plays as well.

For storage, clip it to your bulletin board to prevent creases forming and simply stand it up against a wall somewhere.  If you use your bulletin board during play like I do, be aware that the frame will not support the cork very well under the weight of the lead so put some magazines between the cork and the table top during play to ward off disaster.  Slingshot journals are perfect...


So there it is.  It's not the cheapest way to do it, but I found it to be enjoyable to make, and I'm reasonably satisfied with the results.  It makes for a tough, hard-wearing surface that looks OK and unlike more sophisticatedly modelled boards which use sand, small stones, flock and so on it won't scratch the backs of your C&C:A cards (which is a very important consideration for C&C players!).


All told, I'd say it took about five or six hours to make and - give or take a spray can or two - about $100 US at the current exchange rate.  As I said earlier, if you compare that to the price of a Hotz mat you might find them to be a better option.  That said, you won't get your hotz mat next day, and spray paint may be cheaper where you are than it is in Japanese hobby shops.