Tabletop Workbench January 2021

 

Yesterday's family afternoon saw three of us painting and building, so here are some photos of the wide range of things we had on the table.

Jakob grabbed one of the Tau and gave it dark red armor.

Kilian continued on one of his Grey Knights. This is a half way snapshot, by now the bolter has a nice, flashy red-white striped design and the mini is ready for the final varnish.

I had just put the varnish on my wheeled Gryffon and used the opportunity to assemble the third wheeled vehicle for my long range desert recce force, the 2nd Volterran desert rats. Photos of the assembled self propelled artillery vehicle and the complete force will follow soon.

And then I did something I rarely spend time on: terrain building.

I had recently discovered I still had a few unbuilt cardboard models for village houses left. These must still be from the time many years ago when I built 6mm Napoleonic armies for an 1813 campaign, using minis from Heroics and Ros. They also offered these cardboard sheets for buildings, I think.

I prefer 6mm buildings for my games with 30mm historical minis because that means the ground scale matches better, e.g. a small village offers enough space for half a batallion or so. With buildings matching the figures' scale you end up with small farm buildings that are wider than the front of an infantry batallion in line formation, so ground scale for such buildings in the scale of the fighting units (not of the individual minis) is easily 100x200m, blocking unrealistically large areas on the playing field.

Here you can see some of the old, and some of the newly assembled, 6mm scale cardboard buildings forming a large farm with a fortified keep on top of the hill, and another small hamlet at the bottom. Both of these will accommodate about 2 stands of infantry (a batallion has six stands), covering a realistic amount of ground.

The cardboard buildings are easy and fast to assemble, have very fine printed detail and are easy to store, set up and also move out of the way. When units occupy the village, you can shift buildings a little bit to free up space for the unit bases without changing the overall shape of the settlement much.

When I was done with the village buildings I even had time to pull out one of my decades old unfinished projects, an Ottoman style minaret from some 18th century royal park in central Europe when pseudo-Turkish buildings, dress and music were fashionable in European courts.