It was almost inevitable right?
Over the last few years I've been struggling to find the right mix for my 54's. Just the right look, enough figures to paint without over crowding the table, something simple and fast for when I'm tired but capable of longer more complex games when I have the time and energy. It also had to be something that could share my table with my other collections.
I've always liked a lot about the Square Brigadier but it was hard finding the right balance of size of grid and organization given that it needed to share the table and I had space constraints. There were a lot of good games but the smallest games didn't use enough figures to satisfy me while the largest ones sometimes dragged on without room to manoeuvre and with too many repetitive throws due to the number of units.
A switch to larger squares so I could use more figures without increasing the complexity of the games was promising but my table at the time wouldn't hold quite enough squares and attempts to subdivide them into 3"x 3" quadrants for the smaller figures didn't really work either. Stalemate!
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| Work in progress. |
Welllllll, I was looking through old battle reports last week while working on my 'Battle in a Box', and I was reminded how much I liked the look of the table when it had a 6" square grid painted to look like terrain features rather than abstract lines. It was practical and much more attractive than a either a monochrome green table or a table covered in a clearly abstract, artificial, grid.
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| A shot of my "Sittingbad" game, the last game in 2018. (The table here had been patched together into a temporary 4.5 feet x 6ft table. Great size if the room had been single use apart from the difficulty of reaching the middle....) |
It suddenly struck me today that the new table was just big enough, to have just enough of the bigger squares, to do that again with more squares than my "in a box" set up. I also realized that recent reductions in collections/periods/scales, meant that I was no longer running any gridded games that needed a smaller grid apart from the portable one that has its own cloth.
So.....the table is now down for unscheduled maintenance. I predict a test game by Thursday at the latest.
I'm not going to say I could have seen that coming..... BUT, I love watching how you create and work though what you want.
ReplyDeleteNow... It would seem I need to go and sort out getting some FHG heads for my Scarlet Runners and for the Quickest Out of Ridgeway, at least for a few of them.
Eric
Don't believe all the legends, the courtmartial evidence and conclusions were quite enlightening.
DeleteAnyone paying attention over the years could have seen this coming. The question is, what will be the next step in this evolution?
ReplyDeleteor will things stagnate once balance has been achieved? ()we will probably never know.)
DeleteLooking forward to seeing where the journey takes you next…
ReplyDeleteDown familiar roads....I think...
DeleteRoss Mac,
ReplyDeleteIt sounds as if you are going to end up with an ideal tabletop for your purposes. I cannot remember then number and variety of different ways I've tried to get the 'perfect' tabletop for my games ... and I'm still experimenting!
All the best,
Bob
As long as the credits don't start rolling when I get there Bob!
Deletei'm shocked! shocked i say! won't somebody think of the children? Joking aside, I do love to watch the process of honing in on the kind of game you want - I just have to be careful not to change my whole approach because I'm inspired!
ReplyDeleteMe too! In this case it's really been one long search with pauses for testing, sometimes interrupted by a chance in circumstance which changes the parameters so that I have had to start over.
DeleteI always loved the look of the table in your picture (with the non-linier painted squares). Oddly enough I was going through your website from the start of time the other day looking for these photos. Could you link to more of these photos or show me where they are found (i.e. in what year and month[s])? I always found them to be inspiring and was wanting to look at them again as I contemplate how to design a battle mat for The Portable Wargame.
ReplyDeleteIf I had known 12 years ago that I would write more than 2,000 posts on such a wide variety of topics, often mixed, I might have done a better job of labelling, and maybe even more discipline in writing, but.....probably not.
DeleteIf you look at the list of labels on the right hand menu, the tags "technique" "grid" and "terrain", you should find a fair number of relevent posts and if you scroll backwards or forwards from there you may find more with pictures of the terrain in use. (or click on those labels at the bottom of any post where they show.)