A personal blog about gaming, modeling, and other less than cool ways to spend your time.

Friday, December 17, 2010

Welcome to Stalingrad!

Today, I wanted to provide a sneak peak at one of my many works in progress that has until recently been woefully overlooked, scenery. Since I have taken on numerous different army projects in the recent past, I figured that it was time to make improvements to the window dressing that is my gaming table.



My primary (and currently only) gaming table features an urban sprawl where buildings form the landscape rather than trees and hills. This means that the board needs a lot more scenery to clutter everything up in order to give that sense of realistically being in those steel canyons.



In the past year or so, I've been getting more and more ashamed at the shabby state of affairs that is my gaming table. Too often Rix and I have played on boards with wide open fields of fire, where armor had free reign. But in our most recent game, Rix happened to clutter up a quarter of the board with a disproportionate amount of buildings. Admittedly, this left the rest of the board with sparse cover but the little mini-game that happened in that one quarter of the field really felt "right". In this quarter, lines of fire were limited and my armor felt awfully claustrophobic with an enemy squad of melta-armed scouts lurking in the area.

In the end, I realized that no matter how many armies I created or how well I modeled and painted them that my games would never feel "epic" without fantastic scenery. That is what I hope this project achieves, because you can only beat your friend to a pulp (not naming names, here) so many times before you start needing to dress up the ground on which so many atrocities are committed.


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