ECW Covenanters and Irish

The painting task for the last couple of months has been 20mm ECW. Three units completed:

Covenanter Horse - should probably have given them more obvious blue sashes. Not sure how else they were distinguished from "English" horse.

Covenant Lancers - nice looking figures. Forgot to add the shields but think I prefer them without.

Irish Foot - loved painting up my Irish units in 6mm so here's Alastair "The Destroyer" MacColla's finest.


Will probably do a similar lot of Covenanter next year, and maybe one more batch of English ECW and then that might be my 20mm ECW done!

All figures are Tumbling Dice.

Foam Floor Mat Terrain - Part 2

Flocked up one large mat and three "slopes" over the weekend. All was very quick and smooth and I'm estimating <20mg of static grass per 60cm x 60cm square, so say £2 for the grass, £1.50 for the mat, £3.50 all up (cf 6 hexon units for same area, ~ £3.50 each = £18.50!)

Base coated simply with Dulux Feature Wall Enchanted Eden which is a great general purpose green, seeing as a textured approach didn't work out. Note to self - where I've then brown flocked over the green the green shows through a bit, so will base coat "fields" in brown next time. A few bald spots but can be easily touched up.

For the two hills I mixed in some brown flock with the grass. My intention is to use more brown at each contour tier so as to make relief more visible. In fact I think the brown mix really breaks up the "bowling green" look of the plain grass, so I'm tempted to mix a  bit of brown in even on "ground" level. In the above image the brown is mixed 1 brown to 2 grass.

In the bigger hill its 1 brown to 1 grass. Will play with the mix in the next iteration. The nice thing is that even if I change things around all these units can just be re-used as hidden tiers on the high contours.

One thing I do need to watch though is that on slopes the "lugs" on the underlying mat show through - see above photo. So I need to make sure that if an underlying mat will have its lugs exposed they'll need flocking on the lugs too.

I also need to think about and "field" arrangement - these were just tests as ever and whilst they work fine with hedges around (top photo) look a bit barren on their own. My thinking is to keep all fields out of the edge set of 10cm boxes, so that any mat can match to any other mat, but it may be useful to bleed a few to help hide the edges and to try and randomise any pattern.

Whilst the joins are a bit more obvious in the earlier photos than in my first run (there I flocked an edge that was already joined, here I flocked separately) I still don't think they are too bad and can be hidden by hedges (above), or terrain or probably with a final does of free flock before a photo shoot! Odd that in the top photo the flocks on either side of the bottom join looks so different as done at same time. Also the join to the underlying mat closest to camera again has the same flock - but that was on a darker green. Once nice thing about the 60cm mats is  that at least joins will not minimised (30cm certainly wont have worked), as you want a max of 3 deep (180cm) for reach reasons.

My next trial is sculpting a road/river into the mat - not looking good at the moment but will see what it ends up like. Then try a more "textured" approach to the final board based on YouTube videos. Then time for a second pack, probably to try more curvy hills and have enough to actually play test game on.

Foam Floor Mat Terrain - Part 1

Despite my love of hexes I'm increasingly seeing square grids as more usable for many (most) periods and settings. We're also beginning to look more closely at our Waterloo game planned for 2021 and at 1cm=100m the cost of Hexon is somewhat over £2000! I do like modular terrain though so I started thinking about the sort of foam floor tiles you get for gyms, play areas and workshops. Google turned up a few people who've done this for wargaming so I thought it worth some experimentation to see if it was viable.

My first thought was for 30cm squares, which could then be dot marked to 10cm for play. This size would be nice as you could get a building or small wood on a square, and road/rivers would work well too. But on a big table that would be a huge number of squares with lots of joins, and 30cm squares seem far more expensive than 60cm.

With 60cm there would be less scope for "terrain dioramas", but 1/10th (roughly) the squares and joins, and a lot cheaper, so that's what I decided to try.

I looked at online suppliers, but one warning from TMP was that everyone is different in how the interlock works, so if you buy some now off eBay the chances of matching are slim later. And they are bulky to post. I therefore went for the Halfords one as they were just as cheap as online (£10 for 6), and there is more chance of them sticking with the same supplier. For Waterloo I reckon we'd need ~20-30 packs so could probably arrange a bulk order!

Luckily although they have a high-grip moulding on one side the other side is totally plain. For a start I wanted to look at texturing to I did 1/4 in sand and 1/2 with grout.

I'd picked up some spray at Halfords (although will use paint in volume) and sprayed green, and then tried 3 different flocks I had to hand, my standard static grass, a Noch turf, and some random flocks.

I was massively surprised at how evenly the static grass went down - it looked as good as a Hexon hex. I'd initially discounted this approach, but seeing how good it looks I might change my mind. I can blend some darker flocks in to get more variation than Hexon, and it will go really well with my bases.

The textured surface was totally lost under the flock, so don't think I'll do that.

The flocks were poor - but that may just be the flock. I'll go away and look at some terrain videos to get a good mix of paints and flock and method, and compare that to a multi-shade static grass approach. I reckon the grass will cost about £2 a square, cf £1.75 for the square itself - but still cheaper than Hexon and I only need to flock the top levels.

Really happy with how the joins on the edges (eg the edge trim at top above) blend in.

Another question was how well can I make hills. I found the material sliced really nicely with a sharp Stanley knife, so no problems there. May be issues with keeping orientation and interlocking. Next challenge is roads/rivers (although happy to have those as standalone items).

One question is going to be whether for Waterloo I just do standard pieces which we use to get a best fit, or sculpt the contour edge pieces, or a hybrid. Need to do a square grid overlay on my Waterloo master map.

The other key question is how well the rules will play out on 10cm squares instead of 10cm hexes. Should be just a case of redefining movement and flanks. I'm a great fan of "no two diagonals in a row" and may keep with that. Will have a test game shortly.

That's it for now, will report back when I've tried a few more ideas out, but looking far better than I expected.

My Skirmish Rules Initial Playtest

Following on from last year's skirmish mega-test I finally got my own rules on the table - and promptly found they weren't as finished as I thought they were! Anyway its served to test out some of the basic mechanics as the plucky Brits try and clear a couple of block of insurgents. Key points so far:

• Figure activation is in an order decided before each turn - far more realistic than random. Initiative determines who moves first, then alternate, but there are some actions that will change card order.
• Each figure has typically 3AP to use, shooting can be concurrent with that (you can run and fire!)
• Spotting is similar to my larger scale Contact Wait Out rules, TN and TMs
• Direct fire ditto
• Have got separate rules for suppression and auto fire, but may combine
• Once hit location of damage is rolled first, as then protection (structures and personal) can be taken into account
• Stress markers cover a whole gamut of things like exhaustion, suppression, light wounds
• 3 light wounds and you're out, or one serious wound
• Scenario rules define reactions to friendly casualties for more realistic play

Some bit working well, others less so. Will finish this play through tonight (4 insurgents down for one Brit so far, body armour plus UGL the big plusses) and then try and get the rules finished before I play again.

Section Commander moves forward to the next block

Fire Team B provides cover from one roof top, dead/wounded insurgents L and R

Mud Flat Trees

On a very warm New Years Day at the very beginning of the year I was walking with friends around a bay in North Wales. The tide was right out so we started to short-cut across the mud flats. I then realised that the small (8-16cm) bare stubby plants looked just like scale model trees. So I picked half a dozen up, and put them in a bag and brought them home meaning to see what I could do with them.

Fast forward 10 months and I finally sat down and had a play, and I think they've some out really well. I just sprayed them with the tacky spray glue you use for photos and stuff, threw Noch Underbrush at them, threw on some other bits of flock, mounted them and hey-presto!

Really pleased with the result. Those are 10cm hexons tile and 20mm figures for scale. There are two bare trees at the back as I ran out of Underbrush, some more on order. The dark green Underbrush was too deep I think, so will stick to light green in future.

Hope to be back in North Wales this New Year so may get some more, keeping the location a secret in case I buy up the tree farming rights and turn this into an industry!

Port2Jump Resurrected

Having got the Gushemege Guide effectively completed and now just struggling to find the best way to get it out into the big wide world I can turn my attention back to Port2Jump which I haven't worked on since 2016 - but this will be the Winter I get it working and out there!

Port2Jump is a player/GM helper app for the Traveller role-playing game which takes you through the whole sequence from loading up at a starport, heading out to jump, jumping, and then dock back in the new system. I hope it will also be far more than that and become a way of adventuring in the Traveller universe quite independent of a "physical" game. Whilst it was initially very text centric I started adding still images and am now looking at adding WebGL 3D visualisations. Who knows where it will end up.....

First challenge, completed today, was to get the 3 yr old code running on Visual Studio 2019. Next is to start publishing to Azure so that I can open it up to alpha testers sooner rather than later. Then I'll start actually adding new features.

Earlier Perl Version

Ad Astra *

I got to see Ad Astra last night. I can't say I was expecting much, and I certainly wasn't disappointed. I was going to list some of the tech issues with it but when I got to a dozen I stopped. I know its a film, but I'm sure I read somewhere that the director wanted to make the most realistic space film ever, and if you are setting a film in the "near future" then I think you have more responsibility to make the tech accurate. We already seem to be at the point where Elon Musk science-fact looks more impressive and futuristic than much of SF! The film nods a lot to Apocalypse Now and 2001, but whilst I realise its all meant to be about the inner journey of the main character I'm afraid I just didn't really see any of that, and the ending was decidedly anti-climatic.

Anyway the one bright spot was the most realistic looking moon surface I've every seen in an SF film. Odd that they only had 1970s era Moon Buggies to drive on it though, and were escaping "moon pirates" who otherwise played no role in the film.

And of course that got me to thinking of my GZG Moongrunts and now that my 3' moon/asteroid play mat has arrived I really ought to get the troops on the table!