The gaming area:
I wanted a gaming playing area that was reasonable compact, I wasn’t after a sprawling metropolis: I wanted a small, claustrophobic urban hell perfect for turf wars, swat takedowns and or course the impending zombie holocaust.
Anyway the table had to be:
1. Easy to store/flat pack away.
2. Modular: (ie able to swop the buildings and layouts around for maximum variation).
3. Robust: (As it would be travelling 260 miles to the south east for gaming on a reasonably regular basis).[/li][/list]
So then over to Homebase, (UK DIY centre and their wood department)I went for 7mm MDF, two boards 4 foot by 2 foot.
Once home I painted them with a dark grey poster paint ready to accept the road and pavement layout. I thought that if I painted them first, any little edges where the roads weren’t flush would show up as brown mdf.
Then I moved onto the road layout…..
Again I wanted something that looked reasonable polished, without needing huge amounts of additional detail that could get damaged or damage the other board when stacked.
I looked at a number of options but eventually went with one of the downloadable pdf road and pavement sets from a railway scenics company called Scale scenes
http://www.scalescenes.com and got the roads and pavements set (T034):
Concrete Ground (TX19)Concrete Paths (TX33) Tarmac (TX20)Pavement (TX21)Car park (TX22)These were then downloaded and saved to disk for my visit to staples printers.
As they were created in HO scale, I needed to scale them up so after a bit of playing around and some advice from a friend of mine I settled on between 135% & 144% enlargement, (I say that because I forgot the 135% when I went back a second time and ended up with straight A4 to A3 upscale DOH!! All look ok together though).
So with the roads and pavements sourced my gaming area was starting to take shape:
Armed with printed sheets and gaming boards, I started to plan/sketch out the layout…but realised that without a decision on the buildings or the width of the pavements I was going to have some trouble in pulling it all together.
Pavements:For the pavements I first looked at the new plasti-foam boards board that Jed over at Antenociti's Workshop
http://www.barrule.com/workshop has started to carry, but didn’t go for it, (though don’t worry, loads of little bits and bobs from Jed found they’re way into the project!)
I decided that the pavements needed to be quite sturdy (as in keeping with the modular nature of the board, a number of them would need to be able to be swopped in and out) and I also needed to make some large open areas which again needed to be rigid and not warp.
So back to the DIY centre and over to the MDF again. I picked up two sheets of 3 mm 4 foot by 2 foot MDF, and got them to cut them down to strips for the pavements, and a number of 7”x7” & 14” x7” sections (you gotta love the first two cuts are free rule!!!) for building bases/open areas.
Being 3mm the MDF could be easily cut using a scalpel and metal ruler/set square to ensure good straight right angels.
The printed sections were then measured and cut with a scalpel. They were measured against the MDF the edges were prefolded before being glued and wrapped around the MDF strips. This gave a good clean curb edge.
Further curb stones were cut out and edging strips were added where necessary.
Repeat this process about 30 times and you have all the pavement sections you need. The trick is to be ultra sharp with your folding and clean with your adhesive. I used pritt-stick (giant stick) for the pavement and road sections, nice even application, no lumps and bumps.
Roads:The road and tarmac sections were easy to cut and stick in place.
I was also able to add details such as bus stops, taxi ranks, give ways and stop sections quite easily:
More to follow.
The Commander