Beaux bâtiments en normandie - part 1

To have a good miniatures game, you need rules, miniatures, a surface to play on, terrain, and various accouterments (dice/cards/counters/markers etc.).

For World War II skirmish games I had the first three, but was lacking the third. Since I knew that the forces I was collecting were roughly centered on "late war" and more specifically Normandy (with the paratroopers in the earlier uniforms), I thought that Northern France would be a good place to start.

Now, as you know, Normandy is about as well trod a war-gaming ground as you can find.  D-day, and the months following have built up about as much mythology as you can for something so recent, and of course the terrain itself lends itself to smaller actions, which are easier to war-game on the tabletop convincingly. (even if large actions lend themselves to greater historical accuracy...)

So Normandy terrain.

Fortunately as mentioned above this is a well hoed row, and there are plenty of inspiring builds out there.  In addition, there are plenty of commercially made items for sale, and a plenty of photo-graphical evidence as well, since both the Commonwealth and US armies were accompanied by photographers and other journalists.

A rational person, or at least one not so cheap as I am, would view the above, and then go to some MDF laser cut shop and buy a small village, customize that a bit, and move on.  Not being rational, and being cheap, I went another route:

Unfortunately I did not take any pictures of the first couple buildings at the early stages of construction, but here you can see on in progress to give you an idea of how these went.  Card stock carcass, card and paper details, and modeling putty "skin".   Other buildings got a skim coat of drywall jointing compound, and a couple got foam sheet stone work.

After a "few" hours we end up here:

Then it came time to do shingles...

I cut a bunch of these out on the Silhouette Cameo we have (as well as the windows, shutters and other details), but they covered only one half of one roof, and then I laboriously cut out most of the rest of the strips by hand.  As you might expect, making the same motion over and over again hundreds of times is not great for the ol'muscular-skeletal system, and with eight buildings to cover it took a long time. 

Scale check

The nice thing about old buildings is that they can be used in many eras...

Throughout this project I collected pictures on the internet and printed some of them out, made sketches, doodled in the margins of other things, and otherwise compared terrain to the actual thing.  Google street view came in handy as I "drove" around Normandy looking at old villages and farm roads. I even had my sister send me some vacation pictures she had taken from one of her trips to Normandy (brother-in-law is a Band of Brothers fanatic).

Lots more to come on these buildings!

To be continued:

Cut Paper Bases

In preparation for the SW:A game tomorrow, I designed a set of base toppers using our Silhouette Cameo.  Inspired by the sort of contemporary future bases you see on Infinity or other models, I knocked out these designs pretty quickly, and then wasted some time fiddling around with other things that did not turn out as well (a truss, hex grating, tiny letters etc.). The version you see here is cut from heavy weight paper, and is about .1mm smaller than the top of the 30mm bases I am using. Super glued to the base and then painted, they will be quite durable.

After this picture was taken I dressed up the bases quite a bit more, but you will have to wait to see how they turn out when I post my Inquisitorial Kill team next week sometime.

Custom Dice

As a last minute Christmas craft gift for some of the people we exchange presents with, my wife came up with the idea of "Foodie Dice", or rather came up with the idea of copying the Foodie Dice.  For those unfamiliar, this is a way to deal with First World excess by reducing the choice of what and how to cook to the roll of dice.  Emergent cooking if you will.

The details of replication were left to me, and I found a set of 1" wooden cubes on amazon, and read a few tutorials about making stickers using our Silhouette Cameo, and away I went.  I produced four sets of six dice, and banged them out rather quickly thanks to using the Cameo's print and cut feature, which allows you to design both the print and cut portions of a project at once. I was able to make 144 identical squares, and as they were on sticker paper, applying them to the cubes was easy.

I think that it would be extremely easy to produce a custom dice this way, and could even use symbols in place of the squares provided they were not too complex in shape.  Think X-wing dice, or weather dice, body locations, and the like.  Unfortunately I was not able to find wooden blanks for other common dice shapes, although I suppose you could use this to place stickers on regular dice.  For actual game use, I suspect that a couple of coats of spray sealer would be useful for longevity, and a stain for the wooden blocks might add some interest as well.

You might also see in the foreground a partial imperial eagle... I was after all sitting there with the design software, and it seemed rude not to produce something for my hobby while I was there... this test did not come out quite right (the blade hung up on cutting the beak of one of the heads, and the stickers were just a bit small to handle without tools), but now it will be a simple matter to make an imperial eagle stencil.

Hobby Weekend

This weekend past, my wife and kids were out of town, so I had a bit of a hobby weekend (when not working on painting a bathroom, laying brick, or other household chores that seem to accumulate).

Previous years when faced with such weekends, I have built and painted a Tau platoon, and built an IG platoon twice the size of the Tau one (and which consequently I am still laboriously painting).

This year I worked mostly on a project which is still under wraps, and few other odds and ends.  I do not seem to have completed anything, and certainly not all the projects I wished to, so it seems a bit frustrating.

I did get a little bit of work done on an idea which has been percolating around in my brain for a while.

At work, we have a Keurig coffee machine (actually right outside my door) and the pods come in these boxes.

A couple times a week, I see these boxes in the trash, and it got me thinking about reusing them as terrain. As it turns out they are about 4.25 inches wide, and 6 deep, and about 7.75 tall.  To my mind's eye, these started to look like row houses for a futuristic city... however, at 4.25 inches wide, they are too big to fit two houses on the 8" squares I have planned for my city terrain.

Further, the boxes are made from fairly flimsy cardboard, and so not very suitable for a finished building.  I plan to use just the shape of this box, but replace all vertical surfaces with foam-core cut to be slightly narrower than the boxes.  So much for workplace recycling!

I used our Silhouette Cameo, a computer controlled cutter, to make some bitz and templates for the building, which was very interesting, and certainly more exact than anything I could cut with a knife. (as proven earlier that same day when I mangled some foamcore).

The picture above shows a couple of templates I made, window frames for two buildings, and a bunch of vents.  I stacked up the window frames and vents, and with super glue, effectively made them into stiffer hard pieces, suitable for construction.  The hex spray templates are for a set of rooftop solar cells, which I had made out of a magnetic hotel door key and some sort of toy packaging.

Anyway, that is what I did this weekend, what about you?

Early Christmas Gift - Silhouette Cameo

The wife and I decided to buy ourselves an early joint Christmas present, and got a Silhouette Cameo, which is a computer controlled cutting tool.  The vector file driven tool can cut 12"x12" paper (or smaller) into as intricate a shape as you desire.  The idea is to use it for crafty stuff, as well as wargaming purposes. 

The image above is our first test cut, consisting of the obligatory "Hello World", and a complicated sled/pine branch image.  This was cut on ordinary printer paper, and took less than two minutes to complete, the blade leaping back and forth faster than you would imagine for the tiny cuts in the pine branch. There are some tears from moving too quickly, but you can see the potential.

Ideas I have had for this:

• Game Templates
• Counters
• Spray Paint Masking
• Card stock kits
• Terrain
• Labels
• Prototyping
• Geomorphic maps

I am also keen to try it on thicker material suck as cereal packet cardboard, chipboard, and styrene.  Some other users have had some good success with those, and once you move from 100lb card stock to thicker materials there is real potential for building completed models that can withstand the rigors of the table top. 

So lots of fun experimentation to come with this one, and if you have any ideas, let me know.