It's really starting to come together now.
I completed all the woods (almost) and have laid out all the bits and the troops in their starting positions. A few more machine guns are needed on both sides.
I'm quite pleased with how this has come together.
The first try out of the rules and scenario will be on Monday night!
Over the Easter break I managed to get further with my small scale 1914 terrain.
The fields, roads and hedges are now complete on all the boards and the town and villages are in progress.
The board is modular and can be rearranged for variety. Getting the fields to line up properly was complicated, but the result hides the regularity of the pattern quite well.
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I'm undecided what to do with the edges. Certainly putting the edging strips that came with the mats helps a lot with the look. But should I just leave them as is (i.e. grey), paint them black, flock them or do half and half. I'm unsure... What do you think?
I'm tempted to just leave the edges grey.
The next stage is to add on the woods. After a bit of experimentation I think the best way is to have some black felt pieces coated with my favourite brown acrylic sealant on the upper side. I get a nice texture and the pieces conform to the terrain well.
I'm finally working towards being able to use the 6mm WWI 1914 British and German minis I painted last year. This project has been planned for quite a while, but is just starting to come together.
The main goal was to create a set of boards for doing the 1914 Retreat from Mons scenario for Bloody Big Battles. However I wanted the terrain to be usable for more than just that.
Since it's a very large area that is being portrayed on the battlefield I've scaled it up to about the same scale as I have used with the Battle of Britain game, and in fact used the same base for the terrain, EVA foam mats. However this time I'm going to town with the terrain.
I've just completed the first of the six 2ft square boards I'll need for the game.
The total plan for the board consists of 6 of these tiles; modular allowing the battlefield to be varied. To do this the roads have to go off at the same places on the tiles and there are left-hand and right-hand oriented tiles. This is the arrangement for the Mons scenario:
I've now started on the next tiles. The first job was to cut out the rivers, which I did with a soldering iron and some 3d printed templates. Breathing equipment was worn so as to avoid the horrid fumes of the melting foam.
Once that has been done it's a case of cutting out spaces for the towns and river crossings to go in. The roads marked will not be in those locations and are a rough guide. They will need to enter the removable parts in the same locations to allow the different inserts to be moved around as needed.
One of the inserts is for the fortified town of Maubeuge.
Next I fill the river beds and mark the roads using brown acrylic frame sealant, which I use a lot!
I use it so much, that I've run out again... I'll have to pop down to Screwfix again in the morning.
And here ends this episode...
The second part of my 1914 6mm project is the Germans. Again these are prints of the files from Henry Turner.
There are actually more infantry than I show in these photos...
Back, last Christmas, when I first got hold of a resin (SLA) 3d printer I decided that I was going to attempt to do a WWI 1914 in 6mm for the Joy Of Six show. I decided to use the excellent range by Henry Turner which had everything I would need.
Unfortunately other things distracted me from this project and it didn't get too far. It didn't help that I'd decided to use water-washable resin for the minis and this was very brittle and the models broke very easily.
Roll on to August, and I could get back to the project. I started again with some Sunlu High Toughness Resin, which is really flexible and takes paint well without a primer. This has worked really well and my 1914 BEF force is now ready.
I initially looked at Great War Spearhead II as the rules to use, but these seem overcomplicated for what I need so I've been looking at other systems. Peter Pig's Square Bashing was suggested to me and that looks to be good for fun pick-up games at the club, but really I want to run a scenario game based on the whole or some part of the retreat from Mons. The "Bloody Big Battles" rules set looks promising with the modifications available as a free download and there is a complete retreat from Mons scenario.
So I've tried to be relative rules agnostic and have based my units on 30mm squares (3d printed) with enough to make a Square Bashing army or the army for the BBB Mons scenario.
I'm now on to my Germans... there's loads to do!
