Pico Scale Building Availability

I just got a bunch of Monopoly City buildings in the mail, bought at Boardgame Geek's virtual market. I'd seen the wonderful city pieces produced by Fen Edge Wargaming for his dieselpunk air combat games and I wanted something similar for my 3mm sci-fi set up. Turns out that Warren Colegrave was selling his copy of the Monopoly City on the 'Geek for a very reasonable price. Mr. Colgrave lives in Canada, but he politely agreed to sell me only the building pieces and to send them to me in a cushioned envelope in order to avoid customs fees.

Two weeks later they arrived in Brazil and I started painting.

The pieces from Monopoly City are all different scales and sizes, but they work well together and with old-style Monopoly houses and hotels, as well as the Microform white metal buildings in 1/900 scale that Ana Paula gave me for Christmas in 2010.

I've mounted them all on plasticard and the resulting blocks can be combined in any number of different ways to make cities, towns and villages.

Here are some quick photos of everything I've built so far, laid out along with some roads. The roads have not been pinned down to the table, as they should be, so they look a little sloppy. Also sloppy is the camera work, which is certainly not as crisp as it could be. I plan to take some better pictures soon.

These buildings have been put together over the past 7 years, a bit at a time (excpet for the newly acquired Monopoly City pieces which were all done in a week). In spite of the varying scales and the fact that some of the buildings have windows painted on while others are more abstract, everything hangs together quite well, I think.

 

The first shot shows Picoburg before I laid down the roads, suburbs and airport. In the upper left- and lower right-hand corners, you can see the industrial districts that are made completely of MC pieces, as are the downtown highrises and the apartment complexes on the edge of town.

To the left of center is Olde Towne, the historical city center, with cobbled streets, the cathedral and a medieval city block made out of PicoArmor's Monopoly buildings. The low-rise housing complexes are simple wooden blocks covered in cardboard and gussied up with balsa bits and plasticard. You can also see some Microform buildings in the block just south of the business district.

Here's a shot of the city from the suburbs and surrounding farmland. The airport and roads have also been placed down now. Most of the village pieces are made out of a combination of Monopoly buildings: some PicoArmor, some Brazilian plastic Banco Imobiliário pieces and some old-school wooden houses and hotels picked up on Ebay. The airport is scratchbuilt.

Roads are painted and textured artist's canvas. They should be pinned down and look better when they are. Here, they're just thrown down and it shows.Since I've taken these photos, I've also trimmed their margins a bit. As you can see, they are too wide here.

And finally here's an aerial shot of most of the city, some farms and a suburb. Next build: Picoburg Federal University, home of the Fighting Pixels!

On my "to buy" list now are Brigade Games wonderful 1/1000 (2mm) pieces (which can be seen here at PicoArmor). I plan to put these down on their own blocks, so that they can be used seperately from the pieces shown above. I think they'll look just fine together, however, as long as they are used en masse.


Recent discussions on TMP have revolved around what buildings one should buy for 3mm gaming. I hope this shows that a wide variety of materials can be used, almost indiscriminantly and without much care for "proper" scale. Here we have pieces that go from 1/700 to 1/1200, but the overall effect is quite acceptable. Of course, some care must be taken when composing blocks and even moreso when putting blocks together in cities, but still...

So the answer to the question of "What buildings should I buy?" is "All of them". You should strive to have a wide variety of pieces available in your modeling kit which you can mix and match as the mood takes you (or as period demands).

The best, most beautiful pico terrain pieces out there are by Angel Barracks (3mm English early 20th century town) and Rod Langton (about 1.5mm for Napoleonics). AB's village will set you back 30 quid, however, while Langton's town hall alone costs five pounds!

The entire MC set cost me $25.00 CDN (and that includes shipping). It came with 6 skyscrapes, 8 office buildings, 8 high-rise apartment blocks, 16 houses, 3 prisons, 3 nuke reactors, 3 garbage dumps, 3 football stadiums, 16 small factories,  3 waste treatment plants and 3 windmills. 100 PicoArmor houses will run you $7.50 USD. Old Monopoly stuff can be bought on Ebay for a song. The shipping's literally the most expensive part!

Another boardgame that can be mined for terrain pieces is Big City. Because this is a classic eurogame, currently hard to find, it'll set you back a bit more than MC. Still, the pieces look to be compatible with MC and a copy is up on the 'Geek right now for $32.00 USD.

There's also Irregular Miniatures 2mm stuff (which is closer to 1/1200 scale, actually). I love IM and they will always have a fond spot in my heart for introducing picoscale gaming to me. I have to admit, however, that their terrain is simply not up to current market standards, however. Nor does it mix very well with the other lines noted above.

Finally, if you need 3mm American Civil War stuff to go with your O8 Union and Confederate armies, there's the old Simply Six line, now defunct, but still sold by Pico Armor while supplies last.  Peter Pig's 3mm Hammerin' Iron line, which I hear is quite good, also has a 19th century U.S. American riverside town in 1/600 scale.

I hope this gives prospective 3mm players an idea of what's available and what can be done with regards to 3mm urban terrain. You can also take a look at Steel On Sand's wonderful comparison shots of some popular 3mm terrain lines. When one uses all these pieces together, en masse, the difference between 1/1200 and 1/600 really doesn't show. If you're only going to be using a few buildings, however, it's probably better to make these all one line or a couple of easily matched lines.

30cm x 30cm Terrain Modules

Inspired by Ana Paula's Christmas gift of a bunch of Microform 1/1200 scale buildings (which I've detailed here) and Depot de la Guerre's handcrafted terrain modules (reviewed here), I've decided to build my own terrain modules for my 1/600 and 1/900 (3 and 2mm) miniatures.

The ground scale in these things is nominally 1:10000 (or 1 centimeter equals 100 meters), which makes them useful for my 2mm centimeter scale Volley and Bayonet set up and my WWII company-level figs. However, they can also be easily scaled to 1:4000 (1 cm = 40 meters), which is what I play platoon-scale Cold War Commander at, most particularly my 3mm Blitzkrieg imagi-nation armies of Azurnerreich and Krasnynorad.

This was my first shot at producing "serious" modules, although you can see some earlier efforts for 2mm stuff on the 2mm Yahoo group (note that you must be a member to see them). This time, I made a concerted effort to keep everything in scale. I went for 1/1200 because it's been my experience that "scaling down" terrain a notch or two from the figure scale that will be used on it makes for a better-looking miniatures experience, especially in large battles (which, let's face it, is the main reason to game in 2 or 3mm).

I'll do a terrain tutorial later, if there's interest, but just give a basic rundown of what I did here.

First of all, I went to an art supply store and bought some 30cm x 30cm artists' paint boards. These come in two varieties in Brazil: chipboard and linoleum covered chipboard. Like an idiot, I bought the regular chipboard because, at 3 R$ (2USD) a shot they were half the price of the linoleum-covered ones. Obviously, if I'd gone the other route, I'd have much more warp-resistant boards, so that's what I will buy in the future.

As you can see in the photo above, some of the boards warped. I've been able to reflatten most of them by painting a mixture of glue and water on the backside of the boards, suspending the boards upsidedown on four paint bottles at the corners and setting a weight in the middle of the back of the board. Better, though, to not have the warping problem at all, so linoleum it is next time.

I wanted to make a variety of terrain types on geomorphic modules. I decided that placing streams on the boards would make them too busy, so later I'll build a few specific river and stream modules to slot in with these. My first six boards were (going from the upper righthand corner clockwise):

1) A wooded and hedged agricultural area.

2) A town.

3) An open, undeveloped area.

4 and 5) Small villages with fields and some woods.

6) A large hill.

Three other modules are currently awaiting completion and are not shown here: another large hill and two rolling hills, one with agriculture and one largely undeveloped.

The only major problem I had was with the hill, which I made with paper maché over styrofoam. First, it took a week to dry. Secondly, it shrunk quite a bit as it dried, leaving cracks and exposing the edges of the styrofoam core. I fudged this by painting them as steep slopes and the ultimate result is pretty good, if I do say so myself.

I'm having better luck making the rolling hills, which are smaller. These, I lay out on a thick plastic cutting board and then I stick them in the microwave for 15 minutes. Voilá! Instant hills to be glued down on the boards. I then use a bit of extra paper maché to smooth out the seems. Works pretty good so far.

For the basic modules, I first paint them all over forest green. I then paint on the roads as dark brown. I plot out where I want woods (painted dark green), fields (pained tan and in varying shades of green) and buildings (painted brown). I then use a selection of Woodland Scenics static grasses to flock the fields, followed by green and yellow flocking for the open areas (sometimes touched up with a hint of bright green static grass and dark green flocking). When that's all thoroughly dry, I place down clumps of coarse foilage in medium and dark green for trees, sometimes literally spruced up with a few of PicoArmor's pine trees, here and there. Building lots are then given a dusting of dark green flock and the buildings (which I have pre-painted) are glued down to them. After that, I detail building hedges and small clumps of trees here and there, fruit groves... whatever I think will be fun. Finally, the roads are painted in, grey or light tan, as the case may be.

Simple enough.

That's a Jack Daniels bottle and my hand, for scale. Six terrain modules give me a three foot by two foot set up which corresponds to your average 6x4 foot board at larger scales. Many people often quip "Why play with 3mm figures? It's like playing with grains of rice!" First of all, O8's figs are much more detailed than grains of rice. But more importantly, 3mm allows me to place a beautiful, full-fledged miniatures set up on a coffee table and still have room left over for markers, rules and dice.

Lovely Picoburg. Note the kit-bashed cathedral, made from a Microform house and some plastic strips. I've decided to not overly detail the buildings as that could easily make the modules too busy and distract the eye away from thr miniatures. I've also tried to keep to a generic architectural style which could be used anywhere in Western Europe from the 18th to the 20th centuries. Here, there's only one building that kind of breaks that ruke and even then it doesn't do so ostentatiously. (There are a couple of ranch-style houses, too, but they can easily be glossed as lower-class dwellings).

Looking over the rooftops of Picoburg to the Picoberg on the horizon.

Hedgerows, small villages, woods and fields. A module with congested terrain.











So how do the figures look on the new terrain? Pretty good, actually. For years I've been holding off building terrain modules because I've wanted to go with the drop-cloth and pastels method, putting terrain down and drawing around it so that it can be picked up if units occupy it. I've not liked the "infantry-on-top-of-the-woods" method I'd probably have to adopt if I used modules. After seeing Depot de La Guerre's suff, however, I realized that this was not such a big deal if the modules were to be at 1:10,000 scale.

See for yourselves. Here are some pictures of a Krasnynorad tank regiment forming up to attack a Azurrnereich Mechanized taskforce...

Big Red's 31st Tank Regiment forms battle order out of march columns. Two tank battalions flank Picoville, occupied by a motor rifle battalion, while a third tank battalion waits in reserve behind the village. A regiment of 122mm artillery is deployed to the right of the reserves.

The Thin Blue Line. A reinforced combined arms team occupies the Picoberg and Pico Farms to the left while another team guards the approaches to Picoburg on the right.

The Blue right wing, up close.

New Year, New Terrain: Microform Buildings

...and a very Happy New Year to all you Lead Doesn't Bleed readers (all two dozen of you)!

I took a brief end-of-the-year sabatical in order to attend conferences and grade papers, so this will be the first post of the new year.

Lucky, lucky me: Da Wife bought me a passel of Microform 1/100 buildings for Christmas and they've arrived today!

As most readers of this blogknow, I generally play in 1/700 (or 3mm) scale, so I've wanted some appropriate buildings for quite some time now. Up to now, I've been using PicoArmor's monopoly buildings and these are fine, but they're also a bit too big for my tastes. Like many miniatures gamers, I prefer my terrain to be one scale step down from my figs.

Enter Microform Models, a company which specializes in castings for architects. Their 1/100 scale line is set to a model scale of 1/1200, which is perfect for 2 and 3mm figures (those of you who prefer more in-scale scenery will probably perfer Microform's 1/50 or 1/60 lines for 3mm).

Here are some pictures of the castings, set next to some O8 3mm WWII tanks and infantry and Picoarmor Monopoly buildings...

....and from another angle:

And finally, here's a close-up, which should give an idea as to how these things scale against 3mm figures:

What's really nice about these castings is that they'll still mesh with Picoarmor's Monopoly hotels, which now become 4 story tall townhouses.

Great stuff!

Depot de la Guerre: Handcrafted Terrain for Wargames

I'm sure this is far beyond my budget, but it DOES give one some great ideas for 2-3mm terrain modules, no?

Depot de la Guerra

Just beautiful stuff!

Question: what do you all think he uses to get that field effect? I could definitely use some of that...

Is that washcloth material for the fields or what...?

And look at these Squad Leader boards! Now THAT'S how ASL should be played!!!

More Sci-Fi Tertrain Photos

Here are a few more photos of the 1/600 scale science fiction city, now completely finished, together with a few long-range shots of the jungle.

As you can see, the "towers emerging from the hatches" pieces became something else entirely. In thinking that they are city-sized shield projectors or point-defence systems. Or something. Yeah, that's the ticket. My old plastic and wood block-based buildings form a suburb to the left.

3mm Sci-fi Jungle

Mechas and infantry carefully pick their way through a tubetree jungle.

I wanted a suitable alien-looking jungle on the cheap. Inspired by adolescent memories of GDW's classic wargame Bloodtree Rebellion, I decided that I would do giant tubercular trees which catch water in their middles. Following C.J. Cherryh's sparse descriptions of "woolwood" in her Cyteen series, I decided I wanted the trunks to be a mass of tangled blue-grey branches.

So I bought a medium-sized loofa sponge for a dollar down at the SAARA and cut it up into chunks. I hot-glued the chunks to some old Mechwarrior cards I had lying about, then painted them black, using a fairly heavy black wash and squishing it into the sponge structure with my hands. When that dried, I dry-brushed the sponges with blue-grey. The result was the following:

I then painted the base terracota and did a tan drybrush over that.

When everything had dried, I glooped up the top upper 2/3rds of the sponge with white glue and dipped it in Woodland Scenics generic green flock. I then glooped more glue on the base and put down a layer of fine yellow flock, followed by more green flock. When that dried, I glued clumps of coarse dark green flock around the base and a layer of coarse light green flock along the top of the sponge. Finally, I laid a bead of white glue over the light green flock and dipped the top of the sponge in a tin of Gailforce 9's green summer static grass.

To finish it off, I painted the bottom of the hole in the center of the sponge blue, as if water was reflecting the sky.

Here's the result:

I made two smaller clumps like this and one big jungle piece, complete with path through the middle. Here's a top shot:

Total time taken for the project, maybe 2 hours all told, outside of drying time. Total cost, maybe 5 USD.

Building a 3mm Science Fiction City

Last Tuesday, I took a stroll down through the SAARA to my favorite bead and bangles shop, where I bought 20 dollars worth of wooden and plastic beads and shapes with which to build some sci-fi urban terrain for my burgeoning 3mm mecha armies.

My goal was to make suitably phallic-looking towers a la Dream Pod 9's rendition of the city of Peace River. (I was also inspired by the One More Gaming Project blog's recent Martian city.) I didn't want the buildings to be TOO detailed, as that would distract attention from the minis, but I wanted the to be more than simply painted shapes.

Anyhow, here are the results so far...

And here's a few action shows with the painted main citadel and a few city blocks. Note also the presence of Big Red, the House Möder-Fokker Titan....