Catamarans and Canoes

In my previous post I promised I'd share how I made my Pacific Island canoes and catamarans. And here I am keeping my promise.

Obviously the first thing I did was scour the 'net for pictures, and then jumble them together in my head so I had a kind of generic look to aim for. Not unlike how I did my European sailing ships. Then I sketched out what I was trying to do. I assumed that I'd use matchsticks as the basis for the hulls, and worked from there. The sailing ship at the top of the sketch was just for scale.

And here's the basic bits - 20mm and 15mm lengths of matchstick, shaped with emery-board.

I used small pieces of thin card to create the effect of the highly curved bows and high sterns. The platform for the catamarans is card, with a matchstick fighting platform. I've probably made the catamarans a little wide, but they look right to me, so I'm sticking by the design. I mocked the vessels up on bases to make sure I had the right look. I'd sketched two canoes to a base, but three looked better in reality. 

Catamarans

Canoes

And finally the finished vessels. I cut the masts at 15mm and added sails using thick craft paper cut into triangles.

Theses designs will be very easy to replicate if I feel the need to expand my fleet. There's just over 100pts of vessels in those four, which is an adequate force for a game, but it would be fun to expand this force and then create a duplicate one in a different colour-scheme for some Pacific Island naval warfare.

Basing Paper Figures

Someone asked me how I base my Junior General paper figures, so I though I'd show the process I'm using for the WW1 platoons I've been putting together for Trench Hammer.

Here are the figures as they are printed off. In fact I do a sheet of figures - enough for a platoon plus plenty of support weapons - in one go. I cut these out from one such sheet.I use 160gsm paper. The printer can take it with no difficulty and it makes the figures nice and sturdy.

As you can see they are a front and back view, 'hinged' at the base.

I scored along the line so I could fold the figures in half.

I then brushed on a think layer of PVA to glue the halves together.

Whilst the glue dried I made the base - a 25mm square of mounting board and a 1cm square. A 1cm square gives the right spacing for the figures. Using board in a suitable colour saves on any painting.

Once the PVA was dry I cut round the outline of the figures, although I leave a bit of the white background since (i) it's easier and (ii) there's no guarantee that the two halves have lined up.

Here's the cut out figures.

The final stage is the basing. Sometimes I use the brush and small amounts of PVA, but in this case I just put a blob on the large piece of card and stuck on the small piece. The overflow ...

... can then be used to stick the figure on the base, using the small piece of card as a support.

And the same for the figure on the other side.

In fact a blob of PVA will hod a figure without support, and I've done that with some of the officers, but a support is better.

The finished base. I have started colouring the white edges of the bases in a coloured crayon. Paint will work too, but the crayon gives a softer approximation of the base colours and takes less time and effort.

My other paper armies are done in a similar way, except that the figures are supported by pieces of matchstick. I decided to use card for these because the matchstick has to be cut (fiddlier than card) and then has to be painted (more time). Card was a lazy solution, and seems to work just as well.

The Gothic Empire

A couple of years ago I scratchbuilt some spaceships in order to playtest a possible starship combat game based on the 'Songs of Blades and Heroes' engine. The game was fun, but there were still flaws in it when the developer seemed to stop work on it, so nothing more came of it. This was a shame, as it had about the right level of detail (not much) complexity (not much) and scale of game (small) that I wanted in a starship game, and had yet to find in any commercial rules up to that point.

Anyway, at he time I built three forces, whose adventures you can find documented elsewhere on this blog. However I built a fourth force that never saw action. I found it today whilst rummaging through boxes for something else, and thought they deserved a quick iPhone photoshoot. Say hello to the ships of - The Gothic Empire!

Here's the fleet deployed - one Battleship, two Cruisers, three Frigates and four Destroyers.

The Battleship Sombre Poetry of Dreams

The Cruisers Master of the Tortured Existence and Mistress of the Exquisite Solitude

The Frigates Stygian Purpose, Dark Enshrouded Desires and Fearful Symmetry

The Destroyers Shroud, Suffering, Seduction and Silence

A top down view of the vessels - the largest is a couple of inches long, the smallest about an inch. As with my other starships they are built from stacked layers of card, toothpicks, lentils and grains of rice.

I have to say that, having found these models I'm keen to give them a game of some sort, even if it means fixing the last published playtest version of the rules myself.

A Paper Church

In odd moments over the last couple of evenings I have been working on a design for a church to go with my skinny village buildings for 'Maurice'. I printed it off and assembled it tonight.

Here it is in a larger village (two base-widths by four, or 50mm x 100mm)

Here's the layout in Word. Once again the windows, doors and so forth are taken from buildings available on Junior General.

It does take up more space than I thought it would, but I can't see a way of making the design smaller. I think I'll make another, but stick to the smaller footprint clock-towers  for my other tall buildings.

More Maurice Real-Estate

A few people following my project to produce built-up areas suitable for Maurice (and other games) commented that the buildings would look better on a cobblestone base. So I produced a prototype this evening. I say 'prototype' actually I printed off a square of paper featuring a slightly edited version of this texture from Flickr user Gerald Menzel.

Here it is with some buildings on it, and some unpainted cavalry (the painted units weren't to hand when I took the photos).

And here it is in its 'garrisoned' configuration - minus the garrison.

I shall probably keep the buildings on their own small grey bases, just to provide some contrast, although I may experiment with them on cobblestones as well.

Maurice Buildings - A Different Approach

I did some more prototypes of the flat buildings the other day, but the more I work at them the less I think they will work. The design I have been using looks OK, but because it encloses the area of the building it is not very tolerant of slight differences between the base sizes of the figures and that of the built-up area.

I had considered another approach, which was relatively thin 3D buildings. These would enable a number of buildings to be fitted into a small space, giving a village/town feel, but being thin they can be arranged around the edge of the built-up area when troops occupy it, without taking up significant table-space and getting in the way, thus still giving the occupied area the look of a town.

Today I made some buildings.

I used the Junior General buildings as a basis, but they were mostly constructed in MS Word, using tables. The Junior General facades were pasted into the various cells. This makes the design easy to mass-produce, and folding them and sticking them is also quick as well.

Here's a small villages:

And here it is occupied by troops:

Each building is only 1cm deep, plus a small base for stability, so they will not significantly get in the way of troops moving around outside of the village.

I have used a spare roof piece to show how the gaps between the buildings could be covered by barricades - easily scratchbuilt in a number of ways.

The next stage is to fire up word and come up with a design for a church and some other public buildings.

For those that are interested, this is what the buildings look like in Word:

The roofs are a separate page.

Built-Up Areas For 'Maurice - Part 2

Based on what bits I thought worked, and the comments of others, I spent five minutes with the printer and some glue this evening, and put together a prototype built-up area. It's still rough and ready, but I think it's looking good.

Basically it's the 'Town Square/Street look of the first photo from the previous post, but with a building section in the middle to break up the empty space. The section can be moved or removed during the game. I need to make the whole thing sturdier, though - our screen-door was open whilst I was taking these pictures, and the light breeze kept blowing pieces over. Our club-room is cooled with quite aggressive ceiling fans, so I need to take this into account in any design.

The 'rear' view is looking better; uneven roof lines help.

Troops in occupation. The central section has now been removed, and the streets barricaded. As part of any project I undertake I will make some proper 1" barricade sections.

Built-Up Areas For 'Maurice'

When we played the Ramillies scenario the other week, one thing which I found a little unaesthetic was the fact that when the two main built-up areas were garrisoned by French infantry, they ceased to look like built-up areas.  This was because the area they covered was exactly the same size as that covered by the occupying unit, so all of the buildings representing them had to be removed, leaving us with four bases arranged on a piece of grey felt which couldn't really be seen any more.

Since then I have been pondering how to set things up such that a unit may garrison such a space, but the fact that the area has buildings can be shown. I have been considering solutions based on paper buildings and inspired, in part, by stuff Bob Cordery is doing at the moment with L-shaped building pieces.

This evening, after a disappointing cinema trip to see '300: Rise of an Empire' (disappointing because it was a complete pile of pants) I resized and printed off a few building pieces from Junior General so that I could test some concepts I'd been considering.

This was the first configuration I tried - the built-up area is two base-widths square (2"). This is about the smallest practical area in the game, and I wanted to see if I could make it look like a group of buildings - a village even - rather than just one building.

It's not bad, although the hollow space in the centre isn't quite right.

It does allow for easy deployment of troops, though. Add some barricades and you have a nice garrison in 'Maurice' terms.

I'm not sure it looks so good from this angle, but maybe it's the choice of buildings and a roof-line that's more broken up would work better.

Another possible configuration is a cross bisecting the area into four spaces. This looks too much like a single building, though.

Easy to deploy troops in, it has to be said.

I only did three pieces; this would look better with a fourth, but has that open space in the centre.

Again - with troops.

It looks more like a collection of buildings.

This has possibilities - smaller buildings around the edges, and a larger cross in the centre.

Finally I hit on a possible way forward - User the flat paper buildings to define the area through the whole game, but add 3D model buildings to break up the blank spaces when there are no troops in the settlement. This would look good with the first or sixth photos, and a 3D building (made from balsa and the same frontages I'm using here) placed in the centre, only needing to be removed when the troops move in. I'd get the feeling of a settlement, whilst still having something that's practical in game terms.

As you can see, I'm still playing around with ideas at this stage, and am more than open to suggestions.