Some time ago I made a number of 10cm square terrain squares. These were mostly made from green felt that was glued to squares of plywood, and I made a total of forty-nine squares. These comprise:
- 19 plain green squares
- 5 green squares with straight rivers
- 2 green squares with 90-degree curved rivers
- 8 green squares with straight roads
- 2 green squares with crossroads
- 2 green squares with T-junctions
- 2 green squares with 90-degree curved roads
- 1 green square with a straight road crossing a straight river
- 4 light green squares (to represent wooded areas)
- 2 rounded hills (brown felt)
- 2 rough hills (brown felt)
Over the past week, I’ve begun to make some more of these terrain squares, but this time I’ve used sand rather than green felt.
The intention is that the two sets of terrain squares will be compatible, and I hope to get them finished by next weekend ... if I am lucky!
Hi Bob
ReplyDeleteI manage with 21 scenic squares. 7 are hills, and obviously just one sided. There are 14 more which are double sided. This gives me a combination of 35 different terrain boards. It took a little time working out the best combination of roads, rivers and plain green (grass). I have found that I can make endless different maps using this combination.
regards
Paul
Paul Leniston (Paul),
DeleteI did some serious planning before I began work on my terrain squares. They are designed for 3 x 3 or 5 x 5 Portable Wargames, but if I get the time, I might just try to make enough for an 8 x 8 grid.
The joy of making your own terrain is that you can tailor it to your own requirements. As much as I like my Hexon II hexes, I find drawing maps for them and numbering each hex for record purposes - especially for distanced battles fought using Skype - is tiresome and fraught with potential problems. Squares are so much simpler and easier to use.
All the best,
Bob
Hi Bob
DeleteI also experimented with hex maps. They sound like a much better solution, particularly for movement. It has often struck me as clumsy that map movement can only be north, south, east or west. It also makes it much more difficult to draw a map which can transfer directly to the wargames table. But I always found that squares were just much easier to work with. So much so that I eventually abandoned all attempts to recreate actual maps and replaced them with my regions and districts in place of countries.
And I must admit that I really enjoyed recreating Europs as a series of regions and districts. Whilst still keeping the major cities and towns more or less in relation to each other.
regards
Paul
Thistlebarrow (Paul),
DeleteHexes have lots of advantages … but so do squares, and for some time I’ve felt that for an era when warfare was linear, squares are the best option. Most of my wargaming is now pre-1918, so squares it was!
I think that your regional maps of Europe are ideal for Napoleonic campaigning, with a nice balance between abstraction and reality. It was reading about your campaigns that made me see the possibility of using the Waddington’s game CAMPAIGN as the basis of my own ongoing fictional Franco-Prussian War of 1810.
All the best,
Bob
Bob -
ReplyDeleteThat sounds like quite a project! But I'm picking that the time invested now is time reclaimed when setting up a table! One little issue I had just the other day was drawing up a battle map (per PCW) and then finding my rivers (and to some extent roads) could not 'fit'!
So I reckon you might at a stroke solve that potential problem as well.
Cheers,
Ion
Archduke Piccolo (Ion),
DeleteThe great thing about this terrain project is that I can work on it when I feel like it, and it fits in with my current pattern of frequent trips to hospital for various tests and treatment.
When I ‘designed’ my terrain squares, I played around with some hand-drawn cardboard squares to see how many of each type of square I might need. As a result, my roads and rivers enter and leave a terrain square in the middle of a side. Once I’ve finished my set of desert terrain squares, I hope to produce a simple ‘cut and past’ system to help me to draw maps. If I can get this to work, I’ll be making it available via my blog.
All the best,
Bob