Saturday, 20 March 2010

4 weeks to Bletchley, 5 to Salute.

4 weeks today we'll be listening to the opening lecture at Bletchley.  Gulp!  I've got up early to polish off domestic duties and try to get a full day in on the terrain.

In other news, my period of "resting" will shortly be coming to an end, as employment (finally!) beckons.  It's a good job that the boards are nearly complete!  Post Salute, I expect that I'll have to become a less frequent (but regular) poster.

Friday, 19 March 2010

Quick Zama update

Last night Ian and I had the best playtest so far.  The game was exciting, and felt fairly balanced.; the Carthaginians were very slightly ahead, but we'll fix that.  I was particularly happy because we have felt able to strip out most of the special rules we had been testing, so it is now fairly close to vanillla Command and Colors.  The elephants, in particular, are now in 5 units of 2 and but a mere shadow of their former stompy selves (although they did stomp my Carthaginians a few times, in blue-on-blue incidents!).

Today I received a package from French Greg Privat including the last of the Bruttians, and some casualty minis, all looking very nice.  All the Generals arrived from Nick Speller earlyer this week, and they look great too.  So with the exception of a few more casualty figures that Nick is working on, and the olive trees band hay ricks currently being fashioned in the Scottish glens by my mate John, I now have all the stuff that I'm responsible for.

This afternoon, I'm sticking fields to the boards; tomorrow, hopefully doing some detailing (tufts of grass, etc.).  And I've put in an order for 700 more 5mm map pins...

Thursday, 18 March 2010

Fields of Zama

Sorry that my hithertoo regular posts have become somewhat sporadic!  I've been very busy with life in general, and some very time-consuming and non-photogenic elements of the Zama project.

Here is one such element.  These fields (and others not shown here) all needed to be cut into shape, trimmed, shaved with my Wahl hair trimmer and dyed with diluted acrylic paint.


The next stage will be to stick them onto the terrain boards.  Then I'll need to dress the terrain boards with clumps of static grass, leaves, weeds and whatever.  The board project is now around 75% complete!  Never again.  ;-)

Saturday, 13 March 2010

4" Drybrush Day

Today I drybrushed the 9 terrain boards, with a mid-brown and then a highlight, using the biggest brush I could find!

 Here's a board drying in what passes for sun around here.

Here are a couple of boards with the first highlight.  I hope to apply a very sparse second highlight, tomorrow.  The colour I went for is a sort of raw umber with a bit of tan in it.  It looks a bit grey in the photos, but it is slightly browner IRL.

The boards will look (somewhat) less austere when the fields and tufts of vegetation are added.  I feel an awful lot better about the project, as they are starting to look like something a man could stick a wargame figure on!

Thursday, 11 March 2010

Scene of Devastation

Here's the gaming table after the latest play test of the Zama game (mentioned yesterday), using Command and Colors blocks.  When we packed up at 11:30, the game was getting near a conclusion, with Carthage (far side of table) somewhat ahead on account of the over-powerful elephants mentioned in the comments on the previous post.  Each of the blocks represents 2-4 figures, and the board on the day will be three times as long.

Wednesday, 10 March 2010

Numidian Elephants

I realised today that I haven't posted a picture of the elephants that will stand (possibly all too briefly!) before the Carthaginian front line in the Zama game.  Here are 6 of the 10; a mix of Essex, Gripping Beast and (converted) Renegade.  The other 4 are in the collection of Dr. Simon.

Monday, 8 March 2010

Board 7 of 9

My increasing gaps in posting have been caused by the need to break the back of the Zama terrain, which is proving to be very time-consuming.  I'm trying to get all the Zama boards textured and base coloured before I go on to the next stage, highlighting.

Here's an iffy pic of board 7.  You can see gaps I've left for the teddy bear fur fields; these will be trimmed, coloured and added later on.  The base colour doesn't show up well; the boards are a dark chocolate brown.


I've designed the tracks so that the boards can be combined to make either a 4' by 18' table surface, or a 6' or 8' by 8', so hopefully they will be useful for a variety of other projects in the future.

I still need to find a way to indicate the apexes of the hexes; I'm thinking that I may use pins, pressed into the styrofoam.  These could be removed if I recide to use the boards for something different and non-hex based, later on.