Terrain Boards: Pydna scenario

To test out the look of my new terrain boards post spray paint I quickly set up the Lost Battles Pydna scenario. Both sides begin the battle surprised, so only a fraction of the armies start on table.

I think it's quite a big improvement over the unsprayed version. The colour matches my basing style quite nicely, and the whole is getting closer to how I was envisaging it would look once finished.

There's still a bit more to do, but we're getting there.

More Modular Terrain

Further to my last post, I was lucky enough to scrounge a few more carpet tiles which allowed me to extend the modular terrain system to include rivers. Based on Lost Battles, I've cut out five main river terrain patterns, with some directional variation within that (two left-to-right and then two right-to-left, for example), and now have enough for all scenarios except Sellasia, but I'll probably prepare for that too, just in case.

Here are a couple of sample battlefields as laid out in Lost Battles  with a couple of sample units to show figure scale.

The Sambre

Crimissos

Chaeronea

I still have to do some spray painting on these and I'm wondering whether to add another layer to some of the hill tiles to make them stand out a bit more. I'll see.

Obviously, this terrain is very stylised, but I don't mind a bit of stylisation in my games, and I think this set would also work quite nicely with other projects I have in mind when a greater emphasis on realism in the terrain might not.

Anyway, am feeling quite enthusiastic about how this has turned out. There's still some work to do and decisions to be made, but to have acceptable tables makes a huge difference, and should see a few more games played at house Prufrock in the coming months.

Modular Terrain

For a while I've been gearing up to make a modular terrain set using interlocking carpet tiles. The difficulty has been in finding carpet tiles in the quantities needed, but after stripping the local store of another stack last weekend, I decided that I had enough to proceed.

The main impetus behind this project is Lost Battles. I'd seen the terrain that Phil Sabin and friends use for their demonstration games and decided that that was the kind of thing I'd like to go for.

With a day off today and no family activities planned, it was time to take the first step, which was to make the hill tiles.

After reserving twenty-four tiles for flat terrain (Lost Battles uses a 5 x 4 configuration, but I wanted to be able to do 6 x 4 for games with other rules), I had twenty-nine left to use for hills and other things.

A couple of hours of hacking away at them with a hobby knife resulted in thirteen tiles that can be arranged in various ways to create any of the Lost Battles scenarios.

Unfortunately, I now have to pause, because another fifteen or so tiles are needed to make the river sections.

If I can't track down any more carpet tiles I'll have to look at buying some flexible plastic rivers such as these instead, so if anyone has personal experience of such items and could recommend other manufacturers, please let me know.

Cheers all, and hope it has been a good weekend for everyone.