Gaming Board Repair

Whilst I could blame the damage on neglect, the fact of the matter is that my cratered Martian themed gaming board has suffered quite a bit of damage during house moves over the years. Thus, it was high time to do something about it.

The damage can be seen in the first image that shows about one quarter of the full board. The white areas are where stones have come off, where epoxy resin or plaster mixtures have been chipped away, or where my children have literally been picking at things. There are several scrapes that have been sustained as well that are less obvious.

To correct these maladies, I use a combination of regular paints (red, brown, black) and a special textured paint (basically a thick brown coloured paint that dries anything but flat). I mix the paints together, but not completely -- i.e. there are still streaks of obvious red in the brown colour for instance and apply this liberally to the affected areas. The result is below. As can be seen, its a good remedy, but takes a bit of time to dry out. 

POLL RESULT: Where your battles are taking place

Over the past two weeks, Warpstone Flux has been asking readers where their battles have been taking place recently. This has been the first poll on the blog in quite a while, and received a sum total of 59 votes which was nice to see (maybe we'll have to have another poll soon?).

The poll was inspired by a question that we last asked in 2010. In that poll, both urban and rural battlefields seemed to be equally common. Following this, ruins were very common as well, with over one third of all battles taking place in their midst. This was closely followed up with deserts of one type or another.

In our 2015 poll, we can see that almost one half of all battles seem to be taking place in ruins. And of them, the vast majority are in urban ruins.

Seriously: why are we always fighting over ruins? What is it about a ruined cityscape that attracts space marines to viciously fight Tau (etc.) over the corpse of a Hive? Perhaps there's some ancient artefact that needs recovered? Or they're just scouting and their enemy tracked them down? I just don't know! Narratively, it bothers me a little bit to be honest! But I'll live with it.

Grassy boards and desert boards are almost equally common and account for the next main bracket of themed boards. These can, of course, be combined with ruins and other categories in our poll to make for some more unique settings. And it is these combinations of themes that seems the run a common thread through the poll.

For instance, I was watching many of them roll in. We saw a simultaneous increase in both daemon/chaos worlds with magma/lava theme. Presumably, someone inscribed a big chaos star in a board (example here). 

I was also pleased to see ice worlds and craters feature at a good level in the poll. Presumably the ice worlds are somewhat inspired by the Space Wolves? Equally, seeing that some people put ice worlds simultaneous with trenches and ruins made it much more interesting. 

Forge worlds (an intact type of ruin perhaps?), Trenches, Zone Mortalis / Space Hulks, and Hills, Valleys and Mountains rounded off the major themes for boards.

At a much lower level, dedicated boards to necrons, Tau, Eldar (pictured) and the like seem to be visible at a very low level. Its great that individual factions are still getting a bit of love and attention out there. I haven't actually seen a Tyranid game board yet, but if anyone has a link, or would like to provide an image, we can certainly feature it on the blog as I would (personally speaking) love to see one!

Overall, there is still strong variety out there, but we are perhaps seeing an increase of ruined cityscapes compared to five years ago. Perhaps this just demonstrates the popularity of Games Workshops ruined administratum (etc). Equally, there's perhaps not as many cratered boards (one of my own imaged above) as I might have thoughts. (Then again, the old craters can no longer be found for sale on direct order).

Let's hope that the variety continues, and we don't all converge on ruined cities. Long may you have both line of sight blocking terrain as well as area terrain covering your favourite gaming table.

Cratered Martian Gaming Table

My last post reviewing the out of production GW publication "How to make wargames terrain" reminded me about my (now well used and well travelled) cratered gaming table. I created in many moons ago - readers can trace the story via these links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. I realised that I hadn't updated this chain in a while.  The board has been complete for a very long time now and has seen a lot of play (e.g.: a, b, c, d).

But over time, the board has suffered a bit of damage. The picture below shows a recent picture, if you look closely you can see the wear and tear on it.

The wear is mostly one thing: chips out of the plaster that I used to create it. This can be seen wherever you see any "white" poking through from the red surface. Several knocks during transportation and scratches from children and miniatures can't really be helped. But what I could have done in the first place is include paint in the plaster itself to render it red. Sadly I didn't do that and instead it was white and painted over. I will have to do some (minor) touch up painting work to rectify it, but had I have used red paint mixed in with the plaster, this could have been avoided. Lesson learnt!

The other aspect is that the board is slightly warped(!) Check out the outline of the picture - it is raised by about 1 cm above the carpet on which I pictured it at the bottom end (as viewed). I'm not entirely sure how correct this one: probably weigh it down with lots of old codexes and leave it applied for a while? Suggestions welcome!

Dappling Technique

I had a couple of questions about the technique I used to paint my recent red cratered gaming board.  Namely, how to get a half decent dappling effect going.  For the uninitiated, dappling is simply making jabbing motions with the paint brush to create circular blotches of paint in random patches.  Combine this with several colours, and the effect for the game board starts to look quite convincing.  

But, it can be a bit of an arm ache.  And that results in the dappling not looking very random.  The solution I found is easy: enlist your children, nieces/nephews, friend's children to help out.  Not only do the kids have great fun, but the dappling certainly results in a random distribution that is not heavily affected by arm ache as you cover the full 6 x 4 foot board!

In the image, you can also see my finished craters -- just a slightly darker tone than the surrounding red dust of the planet.  I think its looking good now -- ripe for gaming on!

The Colour of Craters?

In creating a Martian-themed gaming table , resplendant with multiple craters, I faced a painting issue: what colour should the interiors of craters be?

(i) the same colour as the exterior?

(ii) a different tone to the exterior?

(iii) a different colour to the exterior?

I can see arguments in favour of all three, depending on the geology of the planet in questions.  But eventually, I decided that it didn't matter too much: this is science fiction and therefore we're at liberty to come up with something ourselves.  That said, I didn't want luminous green crater interiors ... just something that looked plausible, if not "right" (whatever that means).

Accordingly, I began to paint the interiors of the craters in a slightly darker tone to the exterior, with a touch more brown paint added.  In the image below, I've tweaked the colour contrast settings to bring out the change in colour more than is apparent in real life (just for effect).  The interior does indeed look more brown than the exterior.  But, I don't think it looks odd: I'd contend it looks quite a plausible colour for the terrain to be.  There were a couple of layers of watered down black paint applied to this surface to give it a recessed wash, but the effect is there.  The final step will be to highlight the rim of the crater in red (or perhaps a red/orange blend).

Cratered Table Basecoat

Following a thorough texturing, I under coated my new cratered gaming table with an acrylic black paint mixed with hints of browns, purples and reds.  The reason for multiple colours was to create a greater volume of "black".  If you've ever conducted a chromatography test in high school chemistry, you'll be aware that the colour black is actually made up of copious amounts of other colours.  Hence adding these other colours to increase the volume of black available is a viable option if one is a little short of black paint!

For the base coat, I went with the original plan of something that is vaguely Martian looking.  Hence, using a mixture of red, brown and orange, I dabbed away at the board in large swipes and stippled (jabbed) along the none-textured region to avoid an obvious brush stroke showing up in the paint work.   I'm very happy with the appearance of the board so far, but I need at least to touch up some highlights on the board and add some fine detail before its finished off.

The interior of the craters has not yet been base coated.  The simple reason is that I'm uncertain what colour they should be.  Are they a lighter or darker tone than their surroundings?  I guess that it could be either given the (volcanic) history of the planet in question, but I wanted to do a bit more research before committing to a certain colour. 

Cratered Gaming Table Progress

After gluing the craters, tiles, styrene sheet and tyranid bits in to place, I started work on creating the texture of the gaming board.  The goal here is for something slightly Martian, or barren world / asteroid.  Whilst the final colour may not be red, the idea is to have a gaming board that is representative of a cratered world. To achieve a good texture basis, I used a lumpy composition of polyfilla mixed with grit and water.  Some of the polyfilla in the image is slightly a different colour: this is due to a different compound being used and a little bit of brown paint added in for good measure.  Although I'm aware that if my painted polyfilla chips it'll reveal the underlying colour, I figured that it'd take too much paint and trial and error to achieve a colour match with the eventual overcoat.  

After the texturing using the polyfilla, I used three different grains of sand (with PVA glue): a very coarse grain that I used next to the primary ridges and adjoint to the craters, a finer (red) sand for the main part, and a very fine (black) sand grain to complete the effect.  Noticeable in the image is that I've tried to stick the sand grains on one side of the craters to make them feel like a wind-swept planetary surface.  

I will probably use a bit more polyfilla on the lower board to create about the same percentage of texture coverage as the upper board in the image before progressing to a painting stage.  But overall, I'm happy with this level of detail so far.

Planning a New Gaming Table

The starting point for a new gaming table is imaged below.  I have a number of basic ingredients that I intend to mix together to produce the final product:

(1) Two MDF boards that together measure 6'x4'.
(2) A slew of craters from Games Workshop.
(3) Some tyranid bits and pieces (notably the bits from the genestealers sprue).
(4) Assorted other bits, including dinosaur bones, plastic (styrene) sheets, and craft tiles.

The goal here is to create a Martian-like surface with some signs of activity a while ago.  Perhaps a planet that was sucked dry by the tyranids.  Perhaps a failed colonization.  Or simply an airless rock.  I intend to glue the craters and genestealer sprue bits to the surface, and then use polyfilla (or similar) to create a more sandy appearance.  For the dinosaur bones, I may not include them with the board, but instead create some scatter terrain from them.



Scenery Inspiration: Spider Crater

Continuing an earlier theme of images that show scenery that I found inspiring, today is a spider's den in the middle of a crater.  A nice mix of pieces from warhammer fantasy including the spider itself!

Planetary Empires: Crater Tile

The crater tile from Planetary Empires has three distinct components to be painted (a) the crater itself; (b) the ruins around some of the edges; and (c) empty land around the other edges.
After investigating some internet pictures of Earth-based and other craters, it became obvious that the central raised circle of the crater should be a slightly different hue to the main portion of the crater, and the outer rim. I have attempted to accomplish this by dry brushing the inner rim to give some highlight to it.

The ruins otherwise followed the prescription that I followed when I was painting one of the ruined tiles earlier. The grassy area then followed on neatly from the ruins area as I blended the two in to one another to suggest that the ruination had occurred recently, but not so far back in the past that the grass has started to over-grow the ruins.