Waterlo60 - Garden Laydown

 

One of the reasons for the dearth of posts on here recently (apart from a general increasing in socialising post-vaccine) is that the Waterloo60 project is now only 2 months from completion. A major milestone was reached this weekend when Nick and I laid out all the terrain tiles for the first time. At 20' x 12' we needed the garden (and a fine day) to do it in.

The laydown fulfilled its purpose, showing that we needed 5 more level 1 tiles, but luckily I had those spare. It also showed what edges we needed (plenty spare) and we could play around with how to lay out the tables to make the whole thing reachable. After Liphook we'd toyed with the idea of have 3 tables running N-S, so that the fight for the ridge didn't end up over a table as edge it did at Liphook. Luckily though our tile arrangement placed the E-W break just behind the Grand Battery ridge, so the simple 2 tables running EW should be fine. 

We also laid out the villages and fields to get a better sense of the look of the thing - but drew the line at 100+ trees.

We also tried a couple of options for the "Tier 0" level, looking at plain cloth, flocked cloth, plain felt, flocked felt, and a whole new lot of tiles. Flocked felt and tiles looked best, but tiles would double the storage/transport need, and take ages. Flocked felt was a bit more expensive but will be more practical in time and space - cue an order for 8m of felt!

It did seem smaller in some ways than I expected. I think its probably 4' narrower than Liphook (mainly on the Braine l'Alleud side, and Liphook had a whole rear table down by Caillou which was never touched, so I think ours will be fine. 

It's classic 1mm = 1m scale, marked in 10cm squares on 60cm tile - and we spotted which tiles are missing their dots. We also laid out each Division as a sheet of A4, in reality it will cover twice that, but it gave us confidence that we had the space.

I had roughed up some rules based on Bob Cordery's Portable Wargame in case we got a chance to use the A4 sheets as giant counters but other tasks were more pressing - perhaps play that another time - the garden party game approach to Napoleonic wargaming!

The hall is all booked (courtesy of my Mum!), Adrian is busy saboting, and Nick is busy basing and saboting. I've got to confirm the laydown to Bn level and smarten up some of the terrain, but otherwise we're almost ready for the big game on 20-23 August!

Here's the complete lawn laydown, S table first, W to E, then N table, W to E.

Start of N row....