6mm Market Garden PICTURES! 24 sept update.

[YPU]

As it is the 80th anniversary of Operation Market Garden this year a couple of my friends and club mates here in Nijmegen wanted to put up a large scale memorial game using the Memoir 44 6-8 player map.

Now that's a more ambitious project than I ever try in less than a year, but these guys do actually paint their lead pile unlike me.

I'm sure all of you are familiar with Memoir 44, but I think it is worth sharing the sheer size of this "overlord play" style map




We have a basic hex battle mat to start with, with hexes about 12cm flat to flat. Even at that size, we'll be playing very rough and tumble with size and scale. We'll have to, sticking to that Memoir 44 map.

Miniatures are well underway, going by good old 6mm of course!





We are mixing a couple of brands. Now I can't take any credit for painting anything, but some of the vehicles are 2d6 miniatures which I sculpted so I can pretend that I contributed there.




In normal M44 you have units consisting of 2-4 plastic figures, so 4 infantry, 3 tanks or 2 artillery per "unit" We are scaling that up and creating these unit bases. We are currently considering adding the units name and Insignia to the bases, it seems appropriate for a memorial game.


For scenery a start has been made on forests, corrugated cardboard, insulation foam and flocking are simple but considering the area we have to cover, probably the best route we can take.




Now I hear you think, why YPU sounds like you haven't done anything on your end yet... And you'd be correct. Hopefully I'll be churning out roads and rivers in the same way I did for my 6mm sci-fi table soon.
Something like this:



though a lot narrower rivers and fewer road markings.


I also hope to start 3d printing, and where necessary, sculpting the important landmarks. Now I think we can all agree that when doing a market garden game in Nijmegen, the first thing should be all the bridges. They function as objectives in the scenario as well after all. After that I may try doing other iconic landmarks like churches, though considering the amount of roads and rivers that's a long way down the to-do list yet.

[YPU]

Having run the map trough CAD in the correct size I now know that we will need

-Just over 10 METERS of road. Not scale meters, no actual full-size meters.

-About 5 Meters of rivers and canals. The second one at least is allowed to be mostly straight and featureless to set them apart from the rivers.

-Enough forest to mark 78 hexes clearly as forest hexes, remember, 12 cm hexes.

-Buildings for 13 urban hexes

-5 Bridges


That last one is providing one of my first questions. I've done my best to overlay the M44 map over a historic map, and action report maps and I think this is the most accurate orientation I'm going to get. Its not essential but having a windrose or some North marker would be nice to add to the table.




You'll notice the red circle. In that corner of the map is the town of valkenswaard and 2 bridges. They are not named on the game map. My best guess is that the top one is "Joe's bridge" in Lommel, Belgium. Assuming I'm correct that makes the waterway there the Maas-Scheldekanaal, or at least a abstraction of  that and other nearby waterways. This leaves the other bridge, however.



Bigger picture for clarity, note orientation is not north facing.


This fantastic map from traces of war suggests that if one of them is Joe's bridge, the other is probably the crossing point used by 12th or 8th corps.



We know 12th had a bridgehead at the town of Geel, however I'm stumped to find what bridge and exact location.

[6milPhil]

That's gonna be grand. 

[ithoriel]

Can't help with the identification of the bridge but I just have to say that this is a fantastic project!

I look forward to pictures of progress ... and of the finished article.

Now, who can I lure into a game of Memoir 44? 

[fred]

A very cool project.

So how big is the table, if you need 10m of roads?

[YPU]

A very cool project.

So how big is the table, if you need 10m of roads?

We are using larger hex maps (2 put together) so we have overspill, but the actual playing area should be like this in centimeters.

[fred]

So around 12’ x4’ for those of us who live in the strange mix of metric and imperial measurements!

At one point I started sketching out Market Garden at a 5cm to 1km scale, with the expectation it would just about fit on 8’ length of table. But it stalled due to sheer scale of the project, and lack of rules to work at this scale of game.

Looking forward to seeing how this progresses

[blacksoilbill]

This sounds like an impressive project: some serious terrain building to happen. I look forawrd to seeing it develop.

[jon_1066]

Cool idea.  Was the area really that heavily wooded?

Also do you have the Groesbeek heights?  It was an important factor in the US 82nd thinking.

How will you treat the island?  There was only a ferry for the Germans until the Arnhem bridge was cleared.

Will you give 1st Airborne a chance to get the rail bridge?

[YPU]

Cool idea.  Was the area really that heavily wooded?

Also do you have the Groesbeek heights?  It was an important factor in the US 82nd thinking.

How will you treat the island?  There was only a ferry for the Germans until the Arnhem bridge was cleared.

Will you give 1st Airborne a chance to get the rail bridge?

Short answer no.

long answer: Memoir 44 abstracts a lot of things in favor of playability, a hex can only include one terain type and hold one unit at a time for example. The overlord maps being so large, and playing with 8 people at once tend to be even more simple to prevent complicated terrain interactions from slowing down an already big and complex game.
Doing some very rough calculations, each hex square is a bit over 4km flat to flat. A ground scale of about 1/35000 (somebody double-check my math there.)

The eastern border of the Netherlands was and is one of the more wooded areas. Never hugely dense, but lots of sections of wood. I think that overall the forest represents the areas where that 4km hex would be more LOS blocking than not. Plus some fudging for gameplay I'm sure. The Memoir map tiles look like dense forest, I'm sure my friend making the forests will be happy to go a little sparser on them, if nothing else, it will leave room for the actual miniatures.

Groesbeek, visually, probably goes into one of those "nice to add as a visual detail if we have the time" Mechanically, the way hills work in memoir, it would not work much differently from a forest hext. Actually deciding where it would be on the map is going to be a challenge, its all a bit skewed to get it into that line of a map  EDIT: On closer look, the forest hex at the top of the map above Nijmegen (as presented here) would be the obvious location.

IIRC there is a special rule for Arnhem bridge, but I don't have the scenario rulebook here so I can't confirm. I know there are special rules for the "assault boats" used to cross the river here in Nijmegen, so I may be forgetting about other special rules as well.

Due to the size of those hexes, any bridges less than a couple of kilometres apart effectively become one bridge tile. I am considering making the rail bridge a visual part of the map, but have yet to see how that feels on a hex.
As a side note, I was somewhat expecting to find some 3d files of the bridges online for inspiration, but I'm quite disappointed in what's out there. Guess I'll have to fix that.

[YPU]

Small update

Painting is progressing nicely (not my work) as are the many many trees (also not my work)

I've finally gotten some time to make ingress on the bridges, starting with the iconic too far one of course.



Now scale is a huge abstraction on everything here. We are blowing up the memoir 44 map, using 6mm figures instead of the 15mm ish ones it comes with etc. But making buildings 6mm would make the cities feel even smaller than they already do on this map, and the bridges are even worse.

So we are just doing what looks right enough and leaving it there. For the bridge I'm realizing I need to make the arch removable so that figures an bases can actually stand on it, but I think its looking recognizable at a glance already which is maybe the most important part. The ramps on either side are much steeper than real world, and we need to make sure its visually clear one end counts as a urban hex while the other is a open road but we are getting somehwere I think.

So, question for those reading along. We are mainly making a bunch of "ok when you dont look to close" buildings from foam with windows pressed in for this, but I would like to print some bombed out ruins and maybe more iconic buildings of each city (churches are a good starting point) But when I went looking, stl files for 6mm or small ruins suitable for the region are surprisingly slim pickings. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places though? Does anybody have source for ruin files that would scale down well?

[YPU]

Well, in a shocking twist of events I failed to update the topic here, but instead actually finished a project for once!

We had the big game past Sunday, full 8 player count for the scenario. We had kept some margin in the player count to make sure we'd make the 8 so we had one spare and I didn't end up playing myself. Honestly though, I'm sad the days of wargames having a referee/game master by default are gone, I think its my preferred role.

I spend the last few days before the game rushing to get me parts of the scenery finished as I knew I would, and plenty of corners were cut. But when everything was set up on the table... damn that looked good!





Its hard to capture the scale of the table in pictures. Its 3.3 meters long! All 3 field commanders had ample arm room in their own sections during play.






For a number of reasons we worked pretty modular here. Partially just because of the size of things, I wasnt going to make a meter long river in one piece to begin with, and my materials wouldnt allow for it either. So we now have a hex grid mat and matching forests, towns river and channels to go with it, which is bound to come in handy for all sorts of games going forward. I'm already making some extra bits to go with some parts to make them more usable in other games as well.
Mostly bridges. Surprising no one, this scenario shows that you need more bridges.



I now have 2.4 meters of narrow channels. Very quick construction but on the table they did the job. I was surprised by the lack of stl files for 6mm bailey bridges, so I fixed that. I plan to polish if their files a bit and make them available soon.


And the rivers are even worse! nearly 5 meters of rivers done. I'll admit I left the bridges for far too late and burned some midnight oil to get them done the night before, but again, on the full table I was very pleased with the results. The top trusses are removable to allow models to be placed on the bridge during play, which was much appreciated by the players.






In our game as well, Arnhem and the John Frost bridge ended up being the linchpin of the battle. It was close till the final turn, with some very poor dice rolls on the allied side guaranteeing the German victory the next turn.






Plenty of small things I wish I'd done differently, of course. I didn't get round to painting the roads, I knew the sanded bare plastic looked good enough just cut to shape. Next step would have been sanding down the edges with have a big of a lip from the cutting, cleaning it all and priming then painting. Quite a bit of work to make the roads a slightly more realistic shade of dark grey. An easy target to drop. It really didn't jump out during the game but I wish I had gotten a black or dark brown masking tape for connecting the roads and waterways together instead of t his very noticeable lavender one.

I should also add that All the elements I contributed would have looked a lot poorer if my partner hadn't enthusiastically spend hours of her weekend helping me with all sorts of tedious tasks. Honestly the rivers probably would have been painted blue with no shores, grass or gloss coat without her help, and that's barely half of her contribution.

Rushing and corner cutting and all may show a bit. but we have all the parts now. We can make improvements and do this again next year! (there is already talk of adding fields and windmills plus more iconic buildings in the cities)


Perhaps most encouragingly though, it was a good game. Seriously I highly recommend this Memoir 44 Overlord scenario. Even if Memoir 44 is too simplified and abstracted for you normally, this really hits the spot. The command chain friction you get from a supreme commander player actually dividing the action cards for example. Sure you can simulate that with a die roll but the moment its your friend, and he cant tell you if he just doesnt have the right card for you or is actively ignoring you over other priorities really adds something other games lack.
As mentioned before we played in Nijmegen. Most of our players had been at re-enactments of the events the very day before the game, and all the week leading up to it in fact. But playing trough it, making decisions etc really felt like it gave new insights for all of us. Veteran wargamers were looking at market garden, maybe othe most highlighted campaigns of the second world war (in Europe at least) and seeing it with fresh eyes.

And we all thoroughly enjoyed it. The scenario had quite a dollop of special rules spread around but memoir 44 remains simple enough that we finished the actual game in 4 or so hours, playing at a leisurely pace. (not counting for a few pleasant breaks in the sun) all the players were talking about doing it again next year, or much sooner if possible while we were cleaning up afterwards, which is the best reward for all the effort in the end to me.

[YPU]

My Buddy Rens painted most of the figures, half of the scenery I made and also 3d designed the lovely churches we had for the cities, also made a nice flyby video of the game in its starting state over on twitter. It gives you a good sense of how big the table ended up being, you can find it here.
https://x.com/RensvV/status/1837796793460916267

Something that really caught us by surprise was how properly filled the table felt with everything set up. Looking at the 2d game board it felt like there was a lot of open space left and we were afraid that would show in the fully modeled version as well. We had some decorative farm buildings, hedgerows and trees to scatter about. And while they did add to the look, they weren't nearly as needed as we had assumed.

[fred]

Excellent stuff!!

We will forgive the lack of updates vs actually getting the game on the table.


Really impressive to get all of Market Garden on one table (even if it’s a super sized table). And bonus points for both the timing and location of the game.

[YPU]

Excellent stuff!!

We will forgive the lack of updates vs actually getting the game on the table.


Really impressive to get all of Market Garden on one table (even if it’s a super sized table). And bonus points for both the timing and location of the game.

Thank you!

Yeah its quite the abstraction of a map. The figures were 6mm but the ground scale has to be astronomical. Actually, if I find a moment I'll do some math on that. Most of our players were from the region and could point out the place they grew up or were born (I know I could). Most of those spots lacked any specific element. But that level of abstraction did allow the game to flow smoothly and still give a sense of it all that many other games never had for us.