[Fistful of Lead] Westwood...1,000 Popsicle sticks!

[grubman]

(Pictures follow all the boring text!)

INTRODUCTION

The thing I’ve noticed about wild west miniature games that sets them apart from many other skirmish wargames is that you almost need a bunch of terrain before you can start playing.  Since most people want to start playing as soon as possible, this leads to 3 options.

Option 1:  Buy a bunch of resin, or pre-made terrain.  I found these excellent buildings from Sarissa http://www.sarissa-precision.co.uk/store/oldwest25/ but, even with the special deals, I was still looking at about $300 before I had a respectable city.

Option 2:  Build a quick paper city.  Now, every wild west gamer has heard of Whitewash city http://www.erichotz.com/whitewash.html .  In fact, almost every convention that I’ve been to I’ve seen cities of these things.  They are a cool quality product…but to be honest, as a hobbyist, I feel sort of “lame” doing this. 

Option 3:  Build a wild west town from scratch!  At first this seemed like a pretty daunting and expensive task, but in the end, I got mine finished in a week of spare time, and spending under $50!  Now that’s a price I can live with!

ABOUT FISTFUL OF LEAD

I plan to do a proper video review of this game in due time, so I’ll be brief.  As I get older, I find that I’m less enamored by complex game systems.  I am, however, very impressed with games that manage to cover everything needed in the simplest way possible.  I also like games that have a fun “gamey” feel to them.  Fistful of Lead is just such a game.

My first wild west miniature game was GW’s excellent Legends of the Old West.  It is a good game, no doubt, but it is also traditional games workshop fare in that it takes all night to play and you tend to get more involved with the rules, than getting into the feel of the genre you are trying to emulate.

Shortly after using LotOW I discovered a Fantasy skirmish game called Song of Blades and Heroes http://www.songofblades.blogspot.com/ and fell instantly in love.  IN a way, it turned me off to LotOW and I thought several times of working up some wild west rules for SoBaH…but it never happened.

Then, along came Fistful of Lead! http://www.wargamedownloads.com/item.php?item=756 I found this game by accident while working on a wild west RPG.  After reading a couple reviews I went ahead and purchased the PDF, fully expecting to be underwhelmed. Needless to say that didn’t happen.  In fact, I was super impressed with its tight, fun, rules package.  Like all games I come to love, this one handles every situation that might arise in a quick, clean, and simple way.  Not only that, but by its very nature, this game is super easy to house rule and expand in any direction you want.  I plan on many years of fun with FoL.

WESTWOOD, THE BIG PICTURE

 So, I’ve been in a slump lately, and haven’t been working on any projects for several months.  Once I got excited about Fistful of Lead, I found myself with a ton of creative energy just waiting to burst forth!

I didn’t want to just build a bunch of random terrain, so I developed the ramshackle town of Westwood, a cinematic wild west town someplace in Texas, where every trapping of the wild west is close at hand.

Each building has an owner (and possible a few patrons) with a brief background and personality all their own.  These townsfolk, will have special random rules for the way they behave when the guns start blasting.  Once this is all complete, I hope to post it on the FoL yahoo group.

The posse factions that do the fighting in Westwood will also all have backgrounds and names.  All of this should make the scenarios more exciting and give the game more meaning.

REMEMBER DAVESTOWN?

Now some of you may remember way back when I built Davestown http://www.matakishi.com/davestown1.htm and wonder why I’m building another wild west town?  The answer is twofold.  First, I didn’t have room to store that town way back when, so I sold it all on eBay long ago once I was finished with LotOW.  Second, even if I did still have it, it was pretty lame compared to what I plan to do this time…so, there you have it.

BUILDING WESTWOOD

In any case, the whole point of this thread was to show my progress.  After a week of intense, yet surprisingly easy, effort after work hours, I’ve got the core of Westwood finished.

I built the entire thing out of popsicle sticks (150 for a dollar at the local dollar store), thin cardboard, Elmer’s glue, and a few other random basswood craft sticks.  I used just over 1,000 popsicle sticks (which cost a whopping $7 USD)…so if you were ever just sitting around saying, “hmmmm, I wonder what 1,000 popsicle sticks looks like?’ well, now you know!

The nice thing about building Westwood is that I decided from the get-go that it was going to be a ramshackle dilapidated old west town.  This gave me a lot of leeway for being sloppy.  I only did the most rudimentary measurements, and did a lot of eyeballing it.  The end product came out pretty much just like I envisioned it.  I’ve seen a lot of really, REALLY impressive terrain on the web…but for my purposes and attention span, what I did will serve me just fine.

The horses and animals are plastic toys I picked up at K-mart ($3) that are just about the right scale.  The table cloth is just a piece of material I got at Wal-mart ($14).  The miniatures are Blue Moon’s Tombstone civilians ($40).  And for the record, I’ll be using Knuckduster minis for the posse factions (not pictured, but cost $60 for 6 gangs of 6 figures).

NEXT STEP

Needless to say I’ve got a lot of painting to do, both terrain and miniatures.  I plan on doing the whole town in a dead wood grey color.  I’ll use a few dull washes to highlight some awnings, window frames, or roofs, but I want the whole place to look like it could blow over with the next stiff wind. Most of the miniatures are going to be done in subtle colors as well.

WESTWOOD IN ALL IT’S GLORY

[Steve F]

Really impressive, grubman.  And built in a week, you say?  Amazing.

Really looking forward to seeing the painted version.

[Heldrak]

A very impressive start, Grub'!  

Were the buildings built around a core of foamcore board, or are they pure popsicle stick all the way through...?

Any chance we could see a step-by-step on an individual building?

[Calimero]

These buildings all look very nice

[grubman]

I wasn’t really planning on a tutorial…but I did take some pictures in case someone asked.  This is the doctors building.



First step is some rudimentary plan of where I’m going.

Next, I cut out the walls with thin cardboard (this is from the back of a notebook).

Next, slather the thing with glue.

Next, I placed the popsicle sticks, using as much scrap pieces as I had.

Done!  The excess can be clipped off once it’s dry.  I press them between some weights to make sure they dry flat.


Add whatever decorations to the doors and windows that you like.

Glue all the walls together on a hardwood base (for stability and a little weight).

Add a boardwalk, awning, and removable roof using the same technique…tah dah!  I built 5 of these on a single day off by myself, and did about one building per evening after that.  Waiting for the glue to dry is the hardest part, although Elmer’s dries to wood and cardboard pretty fast…and the down time gives me a chance to do other things (you know, the stuff I should really be doing, like bills, chores, and taking the dog for a walk ).

[Argonor]

Fast and effective! Almost as fast as constructing a Whitewash City collection - and far more satisfying.... 

[Galland]

Personally, I dont like paper terrain what so ever, and the Sarissa houses are not that much better, I find them to be incrediably ugly and sub par on all accounts. I mean, to get the Sarissa houses to work, you really need to put a lot of effort in to them, as have been shown by several members on this forum, that have managed to make beutiful houses, Michi comes to mind, however, when that kind of work is involved, I fail to see why I would spend money on something I need to put almost as much work in to as a scratchbuilt item?
Scratchbuilding is almost allways to prefer when it comes to Old West houses, wich also is true when it comes to many other houses. Old West houses are propably the easiest houses to build, fast and cheap materials, and you can very easily achieve very good results with not too much effort.
Resin houses for Old West seems like overkill to me, even though I got to admit that I have been thinking about it, mainly to save some time, since our group have a bit too many projects going on at the same time, but in the end, it was modern/zombie houses that had to give in and forfeit the scratchbuilding in favour of ready made / bought housing.

Your town is coming on very nice, and the time spent doing it is rather impressive, even though it seems like you have cut some corners when it comes to details and scale in favour of getting a load of houses finished fast.

[BaronVonJ]

Grubman, thanks for the kind words about Fistful of Lead.
-J

[Argonor]

I think I'll have to check out Fistful of Lead.

I really like Gutshot, which is also very simple, but more (IMHO) a simple miniature-rpg best played with each character controlled by a player - FoL sounds more suited for 2-player actions like gang vs posse and the likes.

[Heldrak]

Thanks for the step-by-step, Grub'. I've been sitting on a big batch of craft sticks for a while, waiting for an opportunity to make something like this.

[Argonor]

So, bought and downloaded the rules! Let's see if they can make me dust off my Old West buildings and minis (and get some more painted)!

[archangel1]

Impressive amount of work, particularly for the time spent! Well done!

The problem I have with popsicle sticks, other than the fact that they're all exactly the same size, is that they're too hard.  Everything one builds looks like it was made from the best quality wood and that was obviously not the case in real life.  Distressing them to show some age and weathering is a real chore because of the density of the wood and it needs a deft hand to paint them 'old' (and it will probably need paint - stain doesn't soak in the same way as it does on the softer woods).  I'd rather stick to basswood.  It's more expensive, of course, but it's much easier to work with in order to give a real lived-in feeling to the buildings.

[Belgian]

Looks great and the town is of an ideal size! 

[Froggy the Great]

LOVE LOVE LOVE

[Clearco]

ˇVery Nice! The full city is so impresive!