Monday, September 30, 2013

Woods

A few weeks ago Luke Ueda- Sarson visited and we did a fair bit of gaming. Lukes reports can be found here. Sufficed to say we nearly ran out of bags for my ass.

The first part of the visit was the ceremonial making of the terrain. Using all the standard starting materials we quickly assembled some hills, rivers, roads and hedges. The tatty felt industry received a boost that day.
One thing that I've never really been satisfied with is models of woods.Well, that and town sectors, but I have a few ideas on that.

Our hunt for a better forest starts with the ones I made 10 years ago out of left over carpet from a friends flat. These hexes still serve the SH/MSH group in Wellington.


I was not overly happy with these as they didn't quite work visually on the table,and didn't grip stands particularly well either. However, as we all know, its a fine/invisible line between visual appeal and playability, and I really wanted both.

As an example, here is what I was looking for.


Now, I've put a bit (OK, sod all) thought into this over the years, and it was at last time to act.
I purchased a rubber backed coil door mat, a can of dark green spray paint and a ground foam 'block'. The ground foam block was broken up into small chunks. The doormat was cut up into a variety of shapes, and the top spray painted. They were then covered with PVA and pressed into a plastic tray of the ground foam.


We both felt that the end result worked really well visually and succeeded practically as well


6 comments:

  1. Yeah Rhys, I lost interest in reading your umpteenth thrashing! ;-)

    Good to see some tatty felt still being utilised. Even if you've moved onto those stylish new woods.

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  2. I was just saying to Luke how good those look.

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  3. The 3d effect looked good. Unfortunately, it just showed up the decidedly non-3d hills even more!

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  4. Dylan, I lost interest in playing them!

    Hills are next on the list. Luke has made some very nice ones that I would like to emulate

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  5. Hi there. I wonder if I could extract a little more info about the construction method.
    1) I assume that you got the coil mat from somewhere like Bunnings?
    2) In the second step where you spray paint the top of the coil mat parts, how did you manage to not paint the sides of the coil mat?
    3) I'm not sure that I understand what the "ground foam block" is and where you got it? Was it the same colour green as the end result?
    I know that this is a little presumptuous asking these question, but I like the result and would like to replicate them.
    Cheers
    Martin

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  6. Hi Rhys
    Martin is not the only one with those questions

    Regards
    Paul

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