Western Town Layout and Board

[dinohunterpoa]

The general consensus seems to be modular, but I have only seen bunker monkey use what I would describe as a modular set up, if I go that way I will not need a textured board just a table

Vagabond, you can still have a modular town by placing the buildings as needed in any configuration according to the scenario on a textured board/table!  

BTW: have a great time in your vacations! 

[rebelyell2006]

A plaza is not necessarily a dead zone.  In Las Vegas, for example, it started as an area for holding sheep overnight.  Later, it was used for parking the wagons that brought goods on the Santa Fe Trail.  There was a Hanging Windmill in the center.  Eventually, the residents pooled their money and turned it into a park, with trees and a gazebo in the 1880s.  Santa Fe has a large stone obelisk in middle of its plaza, dedicated to the New Mexico volunteers during the Civil War.  Towns with active and energetic residents would have decorated and green plazas.

Towns would be built with whatever was available in the surrounding area.  Before the railroad arrived, that was dictated entirely by the environment, and successful buildings used the appropriate local materials regardless of builders.  Fort Union is a great example.  The first fort was built by soldiers, using wood logs as the basic building block for their barracks.  The nearby wood consisted of short piñon and juniper trees, which are great for fireplaces but lousy for houses.  Those barracks failed, and were eventually replaced with all-adobe structures at the third fort.  Towns in the prairie would be about 99% adobe and 1% stone, as there are some rocky areas that can be quarried.  Watrous, La Liendre, and Trementina are good examples of that.  The Mora valley had a mix of adobe, wood, and stone buildings, as the forests were close enough to build log houses.  Las Vegas was entirely adobe outside of the stone parish church, simply because it was too far from tall trees necessary for good log houses.  When the railroad arrived, it brought the machinery necessary for saw mills and planing mills (which allowed the Anglos to build their familiar wood houses), along with trainloads of bricks from Raton and Trinidad (for the familiar red brick houses found back East as well).  Stone masons also arrived on the railroad, which allowed for fancier stone structures instead of the cruder ones found nearby.  Before the railroad, the Anglo and Jewish merchants satisfied themselves with adobe houses.  Some of the wealthier people would either spend the money to import construction materials along the wagon trails, or they would clad their houses with familiar materials once the railroad arrived.  That Eastern cladding was also common in Santa Fe starting in the 1880s, as residents Anglicized their homes; they wanted to make the city look Eastern, as a part of converting the territory into a state.  Generally speaking, most structures would be of the most common material found in the area, regardless of the origins of the resident; deviations would be the churches and the houses of the alcaldes, as those could be made from expensive materials.

Adobe structures are made from adobe bricks, with the entire thing covered with a thick layer of mud.  The mud out here is mostly an ochre color.  Whitewash was common, but would easily be displaced by strong winds or violent rain.  The mud covering also washed away over time, so re-mudding and whitewashing was a regular chore for adobe structures.

Generally speaking (at least in New Mexico), the trails and stage coaches traveled from existing community to existing community, as the land-grant system started spreading out small communities long before the American Revolution.  Stage stations were often single buildings that were a day's travel from the next station or town, like Pigeon's Ranch.  Places like Trementina and La Liendre started as there was ample land for livestock and a nearby water source.  Places like Watrous (La Junta) started because of a water source and a closeness to the newly-established Santa Fe Trail.  The same went for the towns in the Maxwell Grant, which started after the arrival of the Santa Fe Trail (mostly with Anglo landlords and Hispano ranch-hands and squatters).  Loma Parda started because merchants understood the needs of soldiers trapped in a fort.  Las Vegas was situated by a river, nestled in a good defensible position but near excellent pastures.  Pecos resulted from merchants establishing resting houses for teamsters on the Santa Fe Trail.  Like the homesteads in the north, communities in New Mexico started because the spread-out ranchers wanted a nearby meeting place with a church and a merchant's shop within a decent distance.  Mining towns like Dawson and Sugarite appeared, and were frequently either owned by a mine company or owned by the people who discovered the minerals.  Railroad towns like Raton and Wagon Mound appeared, in part because the railroad wanted watering and fueling locations, and in part because nearby natural resources made the railroad and branch lines necessary.  Railroad towns required plenty of laborers, and the service industries that made them happy; stage stations required plenty of grazing land for replacement horses and mules.

[dinohunterpoa]

rebelyell2006, thank you very much for the info, I really appreciate that! 

[Vagabond]

Rebelyell - wow - fantastic response thanks a lot, loads of interesting information and I really appreciate you taking the time to put it all down.

Given what you have said it seems like the railroad was the major factor for change, roughly what time period would that have happened, 1880's or later?

You refer to log buildings are they the sort of structures that probably in my ignorance I think of as being built in the forests of northern US and Canada. I didn't realise New Mexico had much in the way of trees, so I would be looking at trimmed logs initially and then sawn timber after the railroad.

It gets more interesting so the time.
Cheers

BTW: have a great time in your vacations! 

Thanks mate although I'm not sure my wife thinks of it as a vacation

[rebelyell2006]

New Mexico is incredibly diverse.  The east half of the territory has the Mesalands, the Staked Plains, and the Chihuahua Desert, along with portions of the Great Plains.  The Rio Grande Valley is mostly desert with very lush vegetation along the bosque; there are some good vineyards along the riverbed. There are also mountains in the northwest, northern, and northeast parts of the state, particularly the Sangre de Cristo Mountains (a subpart of the Rocky Mountains), which has heavy concentrations of trees like ponderosa pines.  Lincoln County, an area associated with gunslingers and the Old West, has rolling geography that ranges from low pine-covered mountains to rough scrub to grassy open ranges.  Las Vegas, also associated with gunslingers, is located between the Creston (a lightly wooded hilly area) and vast seas of grass that turn to scrub as it approaches the Mesas.  The mining and timbering towns of Colfax County are located in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristos.  There were timbering and mining camps in what is now the Pecos Wilderness, which is a series of heavily forested hills and valleys forming the watershed of the Pecos River (ranging between 7000 feet and 11000 feet).  The gold and silver mines in southwest New Mexico were a bit lower in elevation, but still had similar variety.  The southeast corner has fewer hills, and varies between scrub and grassland.  White Sands and the Trinity Site (which is really fun to visit if you get a chance) are somewhat grassy, and acceptable for ranching.  Generally speaking, during the time of the Old West, the northwest was associated mainly with sheep, while other parts in the north also had sheep.  Wool was originally the greatest export of Las Vegas prior to the late 1880s.  Cattle became prominent in the northeast, east, central, and southeast part of the states mainly due to the influence of Texans and wealthy lawyers/prospectors appearing in the late 1870s.  Much of the strife in the territory occurred between the Hispanos (wanting to use the communal land grants as they always did), the Anglos (wanting to buy and fence off that communal land, and establish large company ranches), and the Native Americans (who wanted the Spanish and English outsiders to just go away and leave them alone).  However, the large company ranches hired anybody wanting employment, which meant there were many freedmen and Hispanos working as cowboys.

A good way to describe the state is a narration of the drive from Tucumcari to Las Vegas along state highway 104.  It starts in a railroad town (started in 1901, but had various ranching populations since the mid 1800s and Fort Bascom for a while) in an area that is open grassland.  As it goes west, the road goes around a number of mesas.  The vegetation turns from grass to scrub.  It eventually approaches the Canadian Escarpment, which is a sudden increase in elevation along the Canadian River.  At the top of the elevation, it turns into grassland; that is literally a sea of grass, aside from a few hills that have short trees and large bushes.  At Las Vegas, the land suddenly drops because of the Gallinas River, into a valley that has the town.  If you wish to drive further west along state highway 283, you will go into a hilly area covered with short trees, known as the Creston.  Continuing west, it drops into a valley with excellent pastures and very nice scenic views.  Continuing west, it starts to increase in elevation until it enters forested areas.  At that point, the road splits between a private road leading to a summer camp, and a forest road entering the Santa Fe National Forest.  The NF land is hilly, with trees (a mixture of short piñons and taller ponderosas); it eventually reaches the Pecos Wilderness, and then dramatically jumps in elevation as it reaches the Santa Fe Mountains (with a very prominent peak of the Santa Fe Baldy at over 12000 feet).  There are trails that allow backpacking, and from there you can walk to the state capital at Santa Fe.  Most merchants opted instead to take the Santa Fe Trail, which traveled south of the Santa Fe Mountains, through Glorieta Pass.

The first railroad in New Mexico was the AT&SF, which traveled south from the Raton Pass, arrived in Las Vegas in 1879, and arrived in Santa Fe in 1880; it eventually went south towards El Paso.  The Southern Pacific went through the southern portion of the state, from California to El Paso, arriving in Lordsburg in 1880; both railroads met at Deming in 1881.  Numerous branch lines appeared off of both, to accommodate the timber and mineral extraction (and the ice ponds of Montezuma).  The two main railroads, and multiple smaller railroads, eventually created many branch lines to connect the smaller ranching towns; those branch lines frequently arrived after the end of the "Old West" period.  The towns in Colfax, San Miguel, and Santa Fe Counties and the portions of the original Doña Ana County had railroads during the traditional "Old West" period.  The rest of the New Mexico territory had towns that were established around ranching and land grant communities, along with a few stage stations and military forts.

Think of New Mexico this way during the Old West period.  In the northeast corner, there were towns established around the AT&SF railroad, the Santa Fe Trail, towns established for the gold and coal and timber extraction, and towns established for sheep and cattle [Las Vegas, Colfax, Glorieta, etc].  In the northwest corner, there was the Navajo Nation, along with various sheep ranch communities [Fort Wingate, Diné, etc].  In the southeast corner, there were small ranching communities and large Texan ranches (as this predated both the railroads, the potash mines, and the oil fields) [Lordsburg and Deming].  In the southwest corner, there were gold and silver mines, small sheep and cattle ranch communities, and towns established because of the railroad and the Butterfield Overland Mail Trail [pretty much nothing, but plenty after the end of the Old West].  In the central portion of the state (running from Colorado to Mexico), there were many small Native American pueblos and enforced reservations for nomadic peoples, along with sheep and cattle ranches [Lincoln, Roswell, the Mescalero and Jicarilla areas, the Rio Grande valley and Valverde].

[rebelyell2006]

Of course, I say that and then completely forget that Blackjack Ketchum was active up until 1901.  At that point, there were numerous tiny railroad towns and branch lines that went out to the previously established ranching communities.  Ketchum was hanged in Clayton, which was a town along the Santa Fe Trail (and eventually gained a railroad branch line).  By 1901, some of those mining towns in the northeast and southwest failed, Las Vegas had split into two modern cities (that did not reunite until 1970), and the southeast was already starting to explore the possibilities of oil in the Permian Basin.

[Vagabond]

Fantastic, that's really interesting. I had a quick look at Las Vegas and came up with Las Gorras Blancas  in the 1890's and lots of other stuff to make game scenarios from.

The state topography sounds splendid. Wikipedia says no country for old men was filmed around Las Vegas and that is exactly how I envisioned the dry dessert I want to try and create for my games.

You don't work for the tourist board do you - because you certainly sold me on the place. I also came across loads of photos from the 1880's by using the town names, something I've not been finding with a more general Google search.

The Hanging Windmill search came up with even more game scenarios.

So a huge THANKS.

[rebelyell2006]

No, I just live in the Old West and want to share information with those who would have to fly out here to see it themselves.

[DS615]

Yeah I definitely would not advise a fixed town.  I think you lose far too much versatility that way. 

I disagree.  Especially for westerns, the town itself is often a full character in the game. 
Having it be fixed so houses and shops are always in the same spot, not necessarily physically glued, means every game is an addition to the towns history.  Players come to know the town like real people do real towns. Over time, the town becomes an entity in its own right. 
  In our games, our town has been the same for years.  It generates a lot of the scenarios just by existing, knowing who the people in the town are and how they behave (based on previous game experiences). It also lends to a "campaign feel", even if you're only playing one off games, buy creating an actual history.
"I activate that guy, the one over there where Clara stole the wagon that one time."

   Another benefit is the details of the buildings.  A shop specific to a town can have details or signage appropriate to that town, without having to worry about it making sense in a general context.
   We have the town set-up as static, meaning it's always laid out the same, but the buildings are all individually based so we can use them in other setups when/if we want to.  The Doctor's house for example has also been an outlaws hide out, the Marshal's home, and the ranch house on a cattle farm.
   It's quite a rewarding experience.

As for the basing question; keep the edges of the base as small as possible, and simply flock/paint/goop them the same as the table surface.  It means every building is sitting on a little "hill", but it looks fine.

We do the same "static placement" with our superhero games, and for the same history-story reasons, though in that case the city is divided into Districts that conform to the game table size.  Not a major concern in a smaller western town.

[warlord frod]

I disagree.  Especially for westerns, the town itself is often a full character in the game. 
Having it be fixed so houses and shops are always in the same spot, not necessarily physically glued, means every game is an addition to the towns history.  Players come to know the town like real people do real towns. Over time, the town becomes an entity in its own right. 

Well said. I could not agree more.

[jon_1066]

I disagree.  Especially for westerns, the town itself is often a full character in the game. 
Having it be fixed so houses and shops are always in the same spot, not necessarily physically glued, means every game is an addition to the towns history.  Players come to know the town like real people do real towns. Over time, the town becomes an entity in its own right. 
  In our games, our town has been the same for years.  It generates a lot of the scenarios just by existing, knowing who the people in the town are and how they behave (based on previous game experiences). It also lends to a "campaign feel", even if you're only playing one off games, buy creating an actual history.
"I activate that guy, the one over there where Clara stole the wagon that one time."

   Another benefit is the details of the buildings.  A shop specific to a town can have details or signage appropriate to that town, without having to worry about it making sense in a general context.
   We have the town set-up as static, meaning it's always laid out the same, but the buildings are all individually based so we can use them in other setups when/if we want to.  The Doctor's house for example has also been an outlaws hide out, the Marshal's home, and the ranch house on a cattle farm.
   It's quite a rewarding experience.

As for the basing question; keep the edges of the base as small as possible, and simply flock/paint/goop them the same as the table surface.  It means every building is sitting on a little "hill", but it looks fine.

We do the same "static placement" with our superhero games, and for the same history-story reasons, though in that case the city is divided into Districts that conform to the game table size.  Not a major concern in a smaller western town.

That's a really interesting take on things.  However it does not preclude a modular build - you just have to assemble it the same every time.  I think at the least the bulk of the buildings would need to be removable so you can use them in different settings - like you say with the Docs house. 

[dinohunterpoa]

Vagabond, IMHO a "fixed" town is a lovely display, and game-wise works well if its a very small town on a big table. For better playability in bigger towns, a modular build allows the players to use a smaller table and "zoom" in specific areas of the town according to the game scenario. This way, of course the configuration of the town itself in a bigger plane stays the same, what changes from game to game is the point of view of the players - allowing them to play the game comfortably seated around a regular-sized table representing a specific section of the town.  

With a bigger town on a bigger table, the players usually have to move a lot around the room... but it is usually great for very active players and multiplayer games!  

You've said before that you are strong in you commitment to keep the town small... Well, just keep in mind that on the game table - as in real life most of the time - no town stays small for a long time; specially these days when lots of new great Old West scenery are in stores each month!    

Once again, have a great vacation! I am pretty sure you time in Greece will provide you with some great ideas for small game towns...   

Pirate towns, of course!    

[Vagabond]

I disagree.  Especially for westerns, the town itself is often a full character in the game.  
Having it be fixed so houses and shops are always in the same spot, not necessarily physically glued, means every game is an addition to the towns history.  Players come to know the town like real people do real towns. Over time, the town becomes an entity in its own right.  
  In our games, our town has been the same for years.  It generates a lot of the scenarios just by existing, knowing who the people in the town are and how they behave (based on previous game experiences). It also lends to a "campaign feel", even if you're only playing one off games, buy creating an actual history.

DS615 and Warlord Frod -  think that what Elbows was implying was that you retain greater flexibility for games and maybe use of buildings by not having a fixed layout.

At the moment as i said I am inclined to your view of having a town that has grown organically and the shops and bars have owners that participate in the games, but it needs to give the best layout for game play, do you have pictures of your town? How does its layout affect games.

That's a really interesting take on things.  However it does not preclude a modular build - you just have to assemble it the same every time.  I think at the least the bulk of the buildings would need to be removable so you can use them in different settings - like you say with the Docs house.  

This surely comes down to elbows point, you have individual houses and so can create the same town over and over or lay them out differently.

What I am interested in is the look of the board and how the buildings sit on the board if they are removable how do you ground them in the board.and can I have a fixed textured street without creating a tactically similar game each time.

Please note this is 1m x .8m board

Thanks for you thoughts its all helping with the planning process.

Dino, thanks as usual for your input.You make some good points.

Don't start with the pirates,   I bought 8 at salute, but need to start the old West first.

Following on from Rebelyells info and what I started to read on the Web I am all fired up, just need the time.

[dinohunterpoa]

Vagabond, hope you all the best with your (surely GREAT) little town; with a 1m X 0,80m fixed board you can have a very detailed and textured surface, it's very nice indeed!

Do you already have a name for it?

My own Wild West town has just been officially postponed... I've just came waltzing from the Postal Office with a new big PIRATE SHIP under my arm and a heck of a smile on my face! 

[warlord frod]

DS615 and Warlord Frod -  think that what Elbows was implying was that you retain greater flexibility for games and maybe use of buildings by not having a fixed layout.

Yes, that is exactly right and I agree. At the same time what DS615 is saying is have a standard set plan for your town and set it up the same each time so that you have a sense of setting history. So, for example, my town's name is "Tinkers Creek" and I have set it up many times to play out various games. (You can see my layout here http://leadadventureforum.com/index.php?topic=51862.150) I use a 3ft square board and simply set my buildings on the board but if it's a game set in tinkers creek I always set it up as shown. Now I can take the same buildings and set up another town say "dead man's gulch" my fictional ghost town and it looks like this.



I also have more buildings so I could make entirely different locations or expand my town to a 4x6 table. Still, I would maintain a specific layout so as to encourage a sense of history.

Now in response to the original question about mounting buildings to individual boards that can still be arranged on your table. I have considered doing that and still may because I would like to try and ground my buildings even more but for now, I like what I've got.