Saturday, December 09, 2017

10mm Franco-Prussian War terrain


While I haven't do doing much wargaming this past year, I have been making purchases and making terrain for wargaming. What you see in the photo above is the result.

The playing surface is a 6' x 4' mat from Deep Cut Studios, with 15cm grids. I chose this primarily to use with the To The Last Gaiter Button rules, but also with the hope of finding a set of grid-based Napoleonic rules to use - if you have any suggestion, do let me know in the comments!

The woods are made using Woodland Scenics tree trunks and clump foliage, hot glued to black mounting board. I will post a tutorial on how I made these another day.

The village/town pieces are made using the buildings from Perry Miniatures' Travel Battle game, which are sold separately in sprues - they are closer to 6mm in scale, but look effective with 10mm figurines too. They are based on pre-textured paper, again from Woodland Scenics, which was glued to plasti-cards for sturdiness.

The swamps are just green transparencies cut into irregular shapes, with tufts applied.

Elevation is created by placing books under the mat.

Last but not least, the figurines were previously unceremoniously dumped into tins after our campaign several years back - I magnetised their bases and organised them into tins according to nationality and type.

We are ready for some FPW games.

A closer view, showing the comparative scales of the figurines and the buildings.

A low-angle view, showing the ridge created by books.

A closer view of a swamp terrain piece. I like how the 'grass' is darker nearer its bottom.

I need a lot of woods terrain pieces, I think; but while I was making more just now I cut my finger badly, which means no more handicraft for the weekend.

The fact that books have to be placed under the mat to create elevation means that the table cannot be set up in advance - in TTLGB the players spend points to place terrain as part of the game, which means less playing time. To overcome this I think I will instead play through the scenarios provided in the 1870 Grand Tactical Rules book.

The FPW was one of the 'bucket list' periods I just had to play, and I spent quite a bit to have them painted, so I am pretty happy that the new products on the market (the gridded mats from Deep Cut Studios, presumably created for To the Strongest!, and the Perry Travel Battle buildings created just for their game) made it easier for me to revisit the period with better-looking terrain.

Now I can only hope that Plastic Soldier Company release some Arabs and Turks under their Great War system so I can do my other bucket list period: The Arab Revolt...

5 comments:

Dannoc said...

A great piece of work. I'm impressed how good the elevation works with books under this mat.

Phil said...

Glad to see this period played, great looking terrain and photos...

SteveHolmes11 said...

What excellent looking terrain.

The trees, villages, roads and swamps go together nicely.
The elevated sections look suprisingly good considering that they're cloth stretched over books.

Great work in adapting components for other games to your needs.
Keeping the DIY spirit of the old Grognrads alive, but with all the fine looks of the new.

Finally, if 10mm is your thing, Pendraken have a range of Middle east WW1.
Admittedly it's mainly aimed at British and Turkish regulars, so may not be ideal for Arab revolt skirmishes.

https://pendraken.co.uk/world-war-i/middle-east/


Lasgunpacker said...

Quite good looking, and the grid seems to be faint enough that you could ignore it for games that do not use one.

FPW is not a period that I am all that interested in (thank the Lord!), but 10mm seems like a good way to go for it, as you can put very large forces on the table, or smaller ones with a ground scale closer to figure scale.

captain arjun said...

Thanks, gents.