Lightweight and Portable Gaming Board?

I spotted these in Halfords (UK car parts shop) the other day and thought they might be feasible to use as a lightweight gaming board. Weighing in at just over 2kg and costing £10 I thought it was worth investigation. As you can see from the wrapper, they fit together to make a 6x4 board. My dining table is 5x3, which is fine for skirmish games like Saga, but can feel a bit cramped for Warhammer, even Dragon Rampant. So I was hoping that it would provide a cheap solution. I could either use it straight from the pack as a table extension, draping a cloth over it, or add some texture and paint.

Opening up the pack, there was a fairly strong chemical smell - there is a little card in there suggesting they are opened in a well ventilated room and left for 24 hours. I pieced them together and was surprised how snugly they fit together. However, they are very light and would be unsuitable for use on a small dining table, the overhanging areas would not be rigid enough, I doubt they would hold the weight of a metal regiment. I will probably put them to use in my garage, laying them on a large table (table tennis size). It remains to be seen how well they take pva glue, texture (sand, gravel, etc) and paint - that's an experiment for later in the month I think.

In place on the dining room table

Interlocks well, but not colour matched if that matters to you

Tile reverse, maybe useful in a sci fi setting?

Easter Boardom

What can you do in a rainy long weekend? It's Easter, so there's not much on TV (hundreds of adverts for chocolate, films like the Sound of Music, and the interminably dull Grand Prix). Plenty of time for hobby then, so I thought I would finally take the plunge and paint up my gameboard.

I bought it last year and sprayed it black in the garden one fine sunny day in October. Then the worst winter for 50 years happened and I have been waiting for fine weather ever since, thinking I would take it into the garage to minimise any mess. But still, the weather is cold and wintry, so I have decided to tackle it indoors.

The first thing I did was the rocky outcrops, painting them grey and then a creamy highlight, then finishing them with some brown tinted antique washes. I'm using some cheap and cheerful art paints I picked up in a DIY shop bin end sale. The effect is really quite nice.

Then the bit I had been most perplexed about, the grass and earth bits. I bought some Woodland Scenics Earth pigment to use as a base colour, but it's really disappointing and does not cover the black very well. Once it was on I scattered on Woodland Scenics turf, in various colours. I was then hoping to spray it with some diluted pva glue and water mix, but that didn't really work either. So the scatter is still very loose. The photo shows some patches that I missed, these are showing as black.

This was a test run, I need to make some changes for the other tiles. The black needs to be fully covered with the antique washes, these go on very quickly and finish to a nice opaque finish. Then I will simply dab on pva glue, scatter the turf and allow to dry overnight. Then I will seal with diluted pva using a decorating paint brush for speed. With a little luck it will be finished over the Easter break, now that I know what I am doing.

Some old friends return

One of the busiest hobby weekends for a long time. On Friday night my orks played the marines, on Saturday afternoon my dwarfs took on the Orcs, and on Sunday I built a little unit to place into the painting pending pile.

The game on Friday was a good one, with 3 objectives to battle over. My orks managed to wrestle one from the marines, just a handful of ard boyz emerging from the wreck of an exploding trukk to beat some nearby assault marines into a pulp. With the help of burna boyz, they managed to clear the marines and hold the objective. One squad of boyz was obliterated in bolter fire, but the warboss and a lone deffkopta remained to contest a second objective. The third objective was held by a small unit of gretchin, a late landspeeder dash to contest it was foiled by a lucky big shoota bullet sending it spiralling into the dirt.

The Saturday afternoon game was a historic one for me - the first use of my new gameboard. I managed to get a couple of half-painted models finished in the morning, so it was a fully painted 2000 point dwarf army I was fielding. I felt bad placing four pieces of artillery on the board, but my opponent did the same and more. His army contained four magic users which completely overwhelmed my single runesmith. The dwarfs suffered a lot of casualties to magic and artillery, the rock lobba being particularly accurate and accounting for many an ironbreaker. In contrast, my own artillery had one decent turn, then misfired or missed. In turn 2 I misfired the cannon, rerolled for the rune of forging, which misfired again, then rolled a 2, taking the cannon out of action for two turns. The flame cannon then misfired and I rolled a 1 - boom went my freshly painted model! Things looked grim for the bearded folk. But when combat was eventually joined the dwarfs weathered the charge, as they so often do, then beat the orcs in the next turn and chased them away. The longbeard unit managed to flank charge a unit of savage orcs (which had been lured out of position by a depleted but brave unit of thunderers). They ran them down, but then braced themselves for a charge from a unit of boarboys. The greenskins failed their animosity test and the longbeards were able to get a second charge in, a very rare occurrence for me as a dwarf player. Not only that, they beat them, and then managed to run them down too! I think that's a first for my dwarfs, catching a fleeing unit of cavalry. The captured banners swung the game my way and I was able to record a minor victory in this historic encounter.

I was so fired up by the return of the beards that the very next day I unearthed my dwarf collection and cobbled together some rangers. I have always wanted to include the metal ranger champion model, one of my favourite dwarf models of all time. I really wanted to make a unit of grizzled veterans in the same vein, but I can't find enough models for that, so I have settled on the plastics as shown in the photo. There's a couple of the older style dwarfs in the regiment, with the newer hands they look quite reasonable. I have no idea when I will get my first game with the rangers, let alone paint them, but I just had the itch and had to scratch it.

Red Letter Day!

What an exciting day - and it's still only lunchtime! I went for a walk with this morning up a small local, wooded hill. I have been dozens of times, it's nice to get up off my painter's arse every once in a while, get some fresh air and exercise, all that kind of thing. Walking through the trees a pair of birds came straight at us, I thought they were woodpigeons but no, it was a pair of sparrowhawks. Magnificent sight! A bit further along I spotted a movement up ahead - it was a roe deer. I have walked this path for about 8 years and it's the first one I have ever seen. It's kind of magical when you see them in the wild, rather than on TV. And the wildlife hat-trick was my walking buddy pointing out that the bird calling in the distance was a whimbrel, a curlew like bird, migrating to distant lands. Okay, not quite as exciting as being buzzed by sparrowhawks or tracking a deer, but they are quite a rarity I am informed by my bird buddy.

What's all this to do with gaming? Nothing really, though there is a tenuous connection. My Realm of Battle gameboard arrived today and I put it together as soon as I returned from the hike. I had some elven archers near at hand and tested them on the board, they do not slip down the slope, which was one of my fears. The picture shows them and the next few elves that will join them. These are the first units of the HE-WE army - an army that will be playable as either High Elves or Wood Elves. Or the Elves of Highwood. And that's the circle complete, the walk in the wood, the wildlife, the battle board, the elf army. Sometimes, these things come just seem to come together like this. Maybe next time I go for my walk, I will see a dryad or a white lion.

Problem solved

The auctions went well for a second week, so I have ordered a realm of battle gaming board, plus a few bits of scenery and landscaping materials to hopefully really do it justice. Just have to wait for it to arrive now. It will be a big job getting it painted, watch this space.....

A pleasant problem

After buying the Mighty Empires set a couple of weeks ago, I was searching through my cupboard for two free tiles that had been attached to a White Dwarf issue - they were given away when the new set was re-released. I came across an old copy of the game, not complete but with enough bits to use with the current set. More than enough bits. I decided to try my luck on ebay, so on went some of the older Mighty Empires components, plus some Heroquest bits and pieces that had lain hidden for so long (probably about 15 years or more). A week later, they had sold for nearly £90!

That leaves me with a cosy conundrum, a pleasant problem, a cordial quandary (yes, I am running out of alliterations). What do I spend the proceeds on? My first thought was yet more miniatures. I could easily pad out some chaos marines with a rhino, maybe terminators and a defiler, to get an instant "free" army. Then there's the upcoming Space Wolves, they look very tempting, and £90 would get me a codex, a battleforce and more. Again, potentially a good starter army for free!

On the other hand, I could spend the money on something I have pondered for a while - a Realm of Battle gameboard. I have gamed for years on my dining room table, using an old piece of green cloth that I must have bought twenty years ago. Along with a couple of home-made hills and some trees, and a random assortment of buildings bought at gaming shows many years ago, these old stalwarts have seen me through a couple of decades of gaming. Practical and long-lived they are, but maybe it's time to move up to something much more in keeping with my paintstakingly painted armies.

Obviously the £90 windfall doesn't quite stretch to the cost of the gameboard, but I do have some more auctions underway (more discoveries in the hobby cupboard that I had forgotten about). Hopefully they will increase the pot significantly. Maybe next week I will buying a gameboard and a new army! Though, I never did find those two Mighty Empires tiles......