Organising a Historical refight pt 4 : The New Zealand division on Crete 1941

 So with both sides sorted, its  time to look at the making of the game boards.

This started a year before when a floor of offices in the Victoria University School of Chemical and Physical Sciences was being renovated. The carpet can only be described as being designed in the 1980's by a wargamer who wanted basecloth replacements and was butt ugly when in situe. I scored as much as I could as it went out over the loading bay. It remained rolled up in my office for a few months.

The NZ offical history supplied a map which I then used to create the base terrain including all the contours. 

The map scaled very close to a table size of 16' by 6' (so 4 tables each 6' by 4'). All work was done in a corridor at Universty outside the undergraduate lab I was in charge of over several weekends. The 4 bases were cut to size (6' by 4') and then the layers were built up. I started with the Maleme end and once that was complete I moved to the one next to it. I also painted on the roads, rivers and sea using housepaint testpots. At this point none of the layers were stuck together and everything was rolled up at the end of the sessions.

On the Friday night before the 2 day convention Paul Reynolds and I set up the tables. The rolled up sections were rolled out and all the layers were gun-stapled in place. A few things were touched up and the town sectors were placed, along with all the placename tags. Paul then applied some small finishing touches with some more painting and some scatter material which really set things off.

When finished the boards looked like this. The picture was taken first thing Saturday morning with the trrops about to be set up. Maleme airfield is front left with point 107 just to the right. The white spot at the center rear is the Prison in the middle of Prison valley with Galatas just to the left. The uneven wear on the different parts of the carpet worked really well defining the contours far better than an overlying cover cloth. The battlefield was a scale 7km x 19km.

At the front right is the 4 page historical background I wrote to set the scene for passing gamers (we were in a larger hall and there were about 150 people playing in competitions) and the clock to keep track of the in game time.