Back To Table Top Games

Back to where the soldiers are rarely wounded and can usually be repaired if they are.

My table has started looking a bit shabby so I set out to touch up the paint. Then it occurred to me that my new organization on 2" wide bases mean that a 4" grid would work again and I wouldn't have to chase around the table to grab one of the rulers or tapes in order to move. My 40mm 16thC and 25mm fantasy collections, both on 60mm wide bases, won't fit, but the squares can easily be ignored. 

After hemming and hawing for the better part of a minute, I got a start.

The Inspector General inspecting the current state of her table. (She lets me use...usually). 

A 22mm ACW brigade with 1 regiment per square.

1/3 of the table has been done but I'm slowly getting better and quicker so I hope to have the table set by tomorrow evening. Past experience suggests that once the basic grids are laid down, the painting may be improved or modified to taste.

 

Anyone Not See This Coming?

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! 

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.   

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.

One Step Closer

I got a little bit more done this morning. The general idea for the scenario is in place and I got a bit more 'work' done on the table.

The central section of the table, waiting for the armies. The roads are made from traction sand which I can't get anymore (black grit seems to have taken over) which is why I sometimes use painted masking tape roads like the streams. The woods are formed by placing trees, rocks and "bushes" on painted cloth bases. Fields and so on can be added the same way. The table top itself has been mottled a bit. This will continue to be added to and changed as time goes by. 

One of the things that I like about a painted wooden table top is that in addition to terrain items that are placed on top, I can add features such as rivers, roads and woods with paint or painted masking tape and then over paint them when I want to change them. After a few months and years, the table top loses its unrealistic monotone colour and begins to look as messy and irregular as most real terrain.

The colours are slightly off in this shot due to a lighting issue this morning but at least it gives a better look at a quick masking tape stream. Essentially the tape is laid down then painted with the same green as the table (I keep a quart of my custom mix on hand.) The stream was then painted over top. When leisure time is available, the painting can be gussied up with rocks, currents and ripples, reeds etc on the banks, and maybe a bit more gloss on the water.   

Looks like Thursday will be a Snow Day which means the dice are very likelyt to be rolling.. 

ECW Battle Preempts Solo Fantasy and Leads To Building Boom.

 A Game! A REAL game against REAL PEOPLE!  In PERSON! First one since the summer of 2019. 

The game will be ECW hosted by Paul at his house on the other coast...of Nova Scotia, about an hour's drive from here. We'll be using his 25mm army but I'll be bringing along some terrain. The scenario requires a village and a church. I don't have much 25mm terrain anymore, but since the ones I built for my 40's are deliberately under scale and compressed,  I thought they'd do and Paul gave the thumbs up. 

However, I didn't actually have  a church.......so:

Hammer Hammer Saw Saw...

So, quick and dirty and the cottage is wider than intended...but I think they'll serve. 

Hmm, the cottage wasn't supposed to be that fat! Oh well, once I paint the door it'll serve.
btw, if you're wondering: Yes. In real life my handyman work is just as sloppy and practical.

Well that's the plan for Saturday, which is still 2 days away so anything could happen, but....... 

Our last ECW game, played in October 2018

 

Meanwhile planning for the  Great Raid continues on the Gathering of Hosts blog.

My 15mm Scots have been idle since they chased the English right out of Nova Scotia so I though a few of them might serve as map markers. 

One way or another, there will be a game this weekend with a battle report to follow!

Shaping the Battlefield

 "Waste not, want not", that's  an old saying that reflects how I was raised. 

I bought many feet of pine boards for use as display shelves 15 years ago when we bought this old farmhouse. A few years later, after I retreated into my current room and sold off or gave away over half of my miniatures and toy soldiers, some of the shelves became various rectangular hill shapes. Now they are beginning to morph into vaguely hex shaped hills as I prepare for battle.

Some of the joints are a little iffy if used to make multi-piece hill complexes, but they work fairly well as stand alone hills and the joints can always be disguised with a little scatter.  

Note that deployed units will face the point of a hex giving them 2 frontal, 2 flank and 2 rear hexes.
 Road columns will face a side and have 1 frontal, 2 flank and 3 rear hex sides.

The new and adjusted bases need a lick of paint, and I'd like to add a new unit or two and get the field hospitals ready and based if I have time. Once that's done, or Friday regardless, the troops will deploy and the dice will begin to roll.

I also clipped my cavalry bases to fit the hex grid, and rebased the guns.

 My initial thought is to start with a small "advance guards clash late in the day" scenario and then follow it up on the weekend by a larger pitched battle with positions determined by the advance guards' clash.

Awright You Slovenly Hexes! GET IN LINE!

 If only Colour Sergeant Bourne had been here to give me a hand. Oh well, we do what we can. Luckily, I have a high tolerance for disorder, so this grid will do for now.

"The enemy is nowhere near General, so push your Division forward with all speed"
(Note the remains of the last of my hex shaped hills from 9 years ago)

I could try to explain my clever plan to make sure the grid did not go askew by laying down a series of parallel dashed lines across the table, marking the alternating vertical sides  then laying down a similar series of parallel lines at 6o degrees then finally reversing direction and doing it again, all while measuring from one side since the board is a mishmash of pieces and neither totally even nor quite square. I could , it worked for the first bit but then I went for supper, and.... yeah, we'll draw a curtain over things.

Luckily the board is make shift and has been repainted numerous times in an irregular fashion which made it easy to block out the wonkiest bits (technical term) and redo things. It won't win any awards for accuracy and precision but I think its functional. 

Now to start tackling hills, I think I can now manage something functional although my wood cutting tools and skill are not up to the sort of rolling terrain I could do with a hex mat laid over shapes. Always good to leave some possibilities for the future. But first, it needs to be tested and I believe an ACW game is in the queue.

 

Gratuitous close up.

The Nine Year Hex

 By 2009, playing on Ron's Hexon covered table was having a strong impact on me. After a year of experimenting with  a 3" gridded Hotz mat, I broke down and hand drew a 4" hex pattern on my table and made some so-so hex hills. After  9 years of experimentation with various square grids (much easier to make hills), and occasional reversion to no grid, the hexes are back!  

June 2011: First battle on my newly hexed table: (link) (using an early version of the Portable Wargame)

Four Inch Hexes work for the Little Guys

 

and for the big guys! (Hence the decision to stick with 4 figure "companies".)

They even work for skirmish games!

At least this will be true once the table is fully covered and ready for a game.

We have work to do!!

Good to go.

The table is set and the scenario/storyline is coming together whenever I stop thinking about it.

Unfortunately, the weather looks good for the next couple of days so, duty calls. Its just as well though. I want to get the Prince Valiant guys out but I have some repairs to do and I want to refurbish and convert a few more figures.

Something New

Today's little project: turning a year old hunk of packing styrofoam into a cliff to hold a tower or coastal battery.

Trying it on for size,

I  have now finished carving  paths, adding a secret back entrance, patching holes, and adding a basecoat of grey.

Somewhere in the Mediterranean.

Tomorrow I should be able to shade and drybrush it, add some flock and generally get it ready to try out.

The Wagons Rolled Out ....

Bridge? Check!
Convoy? Check!

The Supply Train has 5 weeks to get to Huzzah! but its ready to roll.
1 carriage, 5 carts, 4 pack horses. The rest will stay home.

In case anyone thinks comments have no effect, I had just about talked myself out of putting in the work to make the bridge sides thicker but Fitz-Badger's comment spurred me to go ahead. I was right, I had to add 2 layers to each side but it was worth it.

Thanks for all the other comments as well, they are always welcome and read with intent.

I like an old fashioned look to go with my glossy toy soldiers so I went old school, just a bit of fine sawdust for texture over the cardboard and masking tape and then paint. Its not art but I like it and it'll fit with my houses.  I suppose that's the next concern, how few buildings can I get away with and do I need to add anymore?

and it works with my 54's. 

Since not everyone will know or remember the great old Lighthouse song that gave me my blogpost title, here, for your listening pleasure, is 1849 by Lighthouse.  Another old favourite of mine from the 70's.

Bridge 2: The Sequel

This morning, I had a go at improving the profile of my bridge. It was while I was trying to figure out how to recover from a slight error when trimming that I remembered that I needed to measure the bridge vs the river I'll be using.

1/2 inch too short. Wellllll I could get my paints out and modify the river or just grab some more foamcore and make a new bridge with a profile more like the image in my head.

At least, I was sure I had more foamcore..... apparently I was mistaken but its an hour's drive to the closest supplier and I did have some thin corrugated cardboard. This stuff is strong enough and, with masking take over the edges and a bit of texturing followed by paint, it'll do fine. If I'd thought of it earlier I'd have made the sides double thick to make them look sturdier.

So now the bridge fits across the wider river and looks  and more like what I pictured, especially with the 54's.

Like a Bridge in Troubled

After browsing a score or 5 of pictures of old stone bridges, work has begun on a 40/54mm compatible toy bridge. 

Just fits in the 4" grid, is wide enough for a wagon, and crosses the masking tape river nicely,  hmm...hope it fits over the painted river, must check that before going farther. The angle of the top rail needs to broaden out a bit I think, or even be flattened though the straight line with an angle seems to be common in low lying areas as does the more difficult curved profile.

Still, its a beginning.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes

Sometimes even being retired doesn't provide enough time. However work goes on behind the scenes.

"The Plowman homeward plods his weary way." 
(leaving the fields 1/2 plowed, the lazy sod!)

I had been pondering an expedition to find a new piece of cloth for a wargame battlemat for Huzzah! but its just not going to happen. This old rag will have to do despite being a foot short and having a few  slips of the pen from when I quickly drew on a 5" test grid a few years ago.

The initial plan for Huzzah! had been to be just drop sand roads and woods templates onto the table as part of set up but that's a nuisance to get right in a hurry at a Con. An easy, fast, setup alternative that I've used a few times in the last 20 years is to paint the scenario terrain onto the mat and just plonk down trees, houses, etc onto the marked template on the day. That work is now in progress.

Early days yet, but in my head, it already reminds me of the play mats in the old  Marx Mini-Masterpiece Boxed Sets.

There is still time.

"He said hopefully"

Twelve sleeps till I leave for Fall In. Six houses to finish plus six more to refurbish, a gun boat to equip (and hopefully crew), and some board fences to build. No problem. At least Rob already has all of the figures we'll be using including my Fraser Highlanders.

The British begin their first assault over the open fields against the French line.

The houses are being made from foam core and cardboard in the mode of the Stone House often seen on my table but using the smaller foot print of the revised version which I have adopted with an eye to my smaller table and 4" grid. The basic technique is a slacker's version of the Major General's technique. I've had the idea and materials since I built the Stone House but have been stymied by not knowing just how I wanted them to look and what size to make them.

La maison que j'ai n'a pas de toiture,
De porte non plus, de fenêtre point;
J'entre par le haut, comme en cheminée
Rentre la fumée quand le temps est doux
-CHANSON DÉMODÉE, paroles et musique: Gilles Vigneault
It was the 1st track on this album by Les Séguins which I just about wore out at college.
To summarise the relevant part: "my house has no roof, nor door, of windows, none, I enter from above...".

Earlier this year I resolved the size issue and the decision to run this rural Quebec 1759 game decided the look for me. I'm reasonably familiar with the look of 19th Century Quebec urban houses from observation and from looking at prints of the 1837 rebellions but rural Quebec in 1759 is less familiar. Enter the internet which was quite helpful, especially this page on architecture in New France.

As with many things there was no universal pattern and houses built in the late 1600's and early 1700's would have been more primitive and European peasant like just like later ones would be more likely to be stone even in rural areas.  The basic structure would made with vertical posts and either horizontal or vertical wooden boards or a mix of wood and stone fill but usually covered by some form of plaster to keep the wind and snow out. Any one who has experienced winter in Quebec or New England will appreciate the need to block the cold north wind in winter from blowing snow and cold through any chinks in the wall. Windows would be few for the same reason unlike later homes when glass was more readily available. Thatch could still be found but wooden boards or slate were more common on houses especially given the danger of fire from sparks in winter.

One could add gables etc but I'm going for simplified, quick, rugged, underscale buildings with a "floor" to place troops on when the roof is lifted. The second floor is too far down inside most of the houses but my criteria was simply to make sure I could place a company of firing figures into the house and have their muskets stick over the wall to make more room inside.

The following picture was especially useful.

It shows the typical linear arrangement but also some interesting board fencing around the nearer fields where I have planned on making more snake rail fencing. It also shows that the houses themselves would be nearly useless for defence by all but a handful of individuals since there are so few windows to shoot from. I am proposing that a string of my houses will represent an area of houses, barns, sheds and fences where skirmishers could take cover but not line infantry . A large, stone, seigneurial manor or similar might be a more formidable strong point such as the windmill at Ste. Foye.

Inevitably these houses will end up being used in imaginary lands and I hope to do more stone city buildings. The idea I had floated for Atlantica of making town buildings 1/2 square wide hasn't worked well in prototype and I have decided to compromise with the alternate plan of city streets being 1 square wide with buildings on either side. A standard town would then be a nine to fifteen square block needing four to six buildings for a full road junction, three to five for a Tee junction and anywhere from two to six for a town along a road without a major junction.   Grandiose plans might call for several such for a major city fight but most tables will only have one.

It was nip and tuck but after a fallback and rally, a second attack won the day allowing the British to torch the supply depot.

Of course these are for wargames so I must keep in mind that all too often at least some of them will end the game going up in smoke.

If you can't be Right, be Bright.

A test layout for a game.  Its a bit too cluttered for a battle, looks a bit more skirmish game like, and the desired number of 16 figure battalions will not fit on table so it was sent back to the drawing board.  The number of buildings and fences has been reduced and the units reduced to 12 figures and the game is now waiting for Lentulus to take command tomorrow. 

I've temporarily renounced my efforts to make my table look like grassy fields. I just don't have a good enough eye for colour and can't seem to find the right sort of green. (The colour in the picture is not accurate btw.) 

Now it doesn't help that when I drive down the road looking at fields, none of them are a single colour, they are usually a dozen shades of green mixed with as many shades of brown, tan and yellow. If you stand back far enough, it looks like one colour but I can't get it. 

It also doesn't   help that no two fields are the same colour, it depends on things like what kind of plants are growing, are they close cropped by sheep or grazed by cattle, are they new hay, old hay or new mown hay  and where is the sun and shadows? I had planned to use this to make a grid on my table that looks like a pattern of fields but it take long to figure out that I don't have the vision for that either. Perhaps if I were to model a particular set of fields in a particular scale but as soon as I changed the scale or setting that would throw it out again. I'll save that for some future product and any future grid will be of the Promethian barely visible sort.

Anyway, I figured, if its not going to be "the right" shade it could at least be bright and cheery and so I mixed various tempura and latex paints to get an acceptable bright toy table top green and then mottled it with a light green. That'll do me for the foreseeable future.  

The Green Fields of Ohio.

The resurrected 1998 cloth.

Well, it won't win any "marvelous diorama like terrain" awards but its serviceable, practical, flexible and I rather like it. All I did was use a little bit of scrounged green paint to freshen the meadow areas and some light blue craft paint to freshen the water. Oh, and I cut the straight edge of the top mat into a random series of curves. The trees still look a bit sparse to me and there's at least 1/2 dozen that could use bigger bases as well as more leaves and more trees but it'll be hard enough as it is to move figures around the woods. Some dead leaf coloured scatter on the ground and a few more bushes on the day will do nicely.

A wider angled look. Troops are not necessarily organized and placed as they will be.

and for those who don't remember what it was like before:

After Thoughts

In no particular order

1. The Green Canvas Cloth. It has to go, I think. The stiff creases made it hard to maintain formations as even figures on wide heavy bases wouldn't stand on any part of one and the creases and puckers pop up in odd spots all over the cloth. Last year I used it with multi-figure bases so it wasn't an issue. I was going to try to de-crease it but even if successful,  it'd be tough to stuff a 6 ft roll into a packed car for the trip. I think its time to see if I can freshen the soft, pliant, 15 year old one a bit. In the meantime I've cut a couple of dozen tree bases and am trying to reforest my table.

3. Bigger Battles.  MacDuff To the Frontier was not written for battles between armies of 30-40,000 men a side, not even when they're bath tubbed. I did NOT intend this as an attempt at a refight of Quatres Bras but I was curious if the game would feel different if I crammed as many small units on the table as I could. I enjoyed the game but it didn't feel any different or feel like a big battle. Good! That means less risk of internal confusion.

If (and its a BIG IF) I decide I want to do bigger battles with a handful of 40mm toy soldiers, it should be in a different period with different, even more abstracted rules with an emphasis on command processes and timing. Ground scale more on the 1"=100 yard range, and yes 10mm would be a better if less stubborn choice but after all I've had some good ACW games with 54mm plastics and Frank Chadwick's Volley & Bayonet rules which he also uses with 54mm figures so it can be done. A heavy dose of Morschauser would be involved I think.

Archive shot of a 54mm V&B game of Cedar Mountain
fought between Tom Nolan & Walter Spielman(?) and myself c 1999.

4. Goldilocks' Choice. I like the look of my old 20-24 man units but they cramp maneuver room on my table so were too big. The 12 man units in the War of 1812 game felt ok, if any thing maybe too big but here they were too small and having 11 rather than 8 units on the larger size wasn't a game changing choice so I'm going to just leave my existing 16/8 organization for Atlantica. There might be one or two fewer units on the table but they will have more staying power and should balance out. Its an organization that seems Jusssst Right.

5. Run Away!.  There are I think, good historical reasons for my having made it so hard to rout units off table. From a strictly  gaming POV though, there are good arguments to be made for removing broken units and making it more worthwhile for unbroken units to stop and rally.  Essentially the rally rolls were meant as a replacement for both morale tests and Charge!'s compulsory after melee rally moves. This way it is easy and worth while for player's to stop and rally before its too late but at the same time, if there are no fresh units at hand to take up the pursuit, it risks letting the enemy rally as well. Choices to be made and good reason to have supports and reserves.

After considering various alternatives that have been tested in the past few years I took away the rally from broken units again and went back to dicing for all missing figures with a slightly lower chance of success per roll. Should do it.

Fort MacDuff, Guardian of the Frontier

Well, here it is. Darker than I intended but this is the point at which I gave up trying to make the fort look like either my firewood pile or some of the pictures of stockades that I've found on the web. 

Tricky thing wood. The chopped bits of course start out looking like 2x4 lumber but eventually turn bit by bit to a sliver/grey/black colour depending on degrees of moisture, wind action, type of tree etc etc. I've seen 6  month old wood silver grey and year old wood still tan and of course while the War of 1812 Fort MacDuff is probably a recent build, the one in North Atlantica is probably older. Bark of course, is liking trying to paint tweed. 

Anyway its recognizable that I meant it to look like logs which is the main point. 

Now, to get back to work on putting more trees into the forest to be seen, and possibly thickening up the abatis, which should I think be a bit closer to the fort, I think some parts of it are barely within musket range at the closest point making it far to easy to negotiate.

Trees and brush are going to be a problem as always in a forest fight. Thick enough to look right is a pain for trying to play a game. I do need to fix a bunch of the woodland scenic trees which either have  broken bases or have lost foliage but I think more lichen bushes are called for. They give the impression of foliage but can be booted about to make room and don't catch on sleeves or interfere so much with moving figures.

Chop chop, hammer hammer

Progress is being made!

Here we have the final layout The over all dimensions are about right ground scale wise  for a large fort while the layout is not too  far out for a small one and it doesn't look too wonky with the 40mm toy soldiers. Actually I think it has a certain toy soldier playset look to it which is a bonus. There's even a cabin for the officers and the gate still works. The firing step should be an earthen embankment but I had the walkways in hand so figured I might as well save time and trouble and use them. In place of a 2nd blackhouse/bastion I've made a battery position on top of the cabin.

Here's the original with 54mm figures for comparison.
The new bastion/blockhouse is the only part still the original stockade height.

I'm not over confident about the sticking power of white glue on foam so I've used bamboo skewers to hold the various bits and pieces in addition to the glue. The temptation was strong to fix the whole thing to a base but apart from the awkwardness for storing, I will want to use the fort on various table tops and a base would fit some and not others. I also want to be able to use part of the fort on a table edge/corner and/or be able to replace the bastion by a blockhouse. 

Here we have the 3 sections. Once the glue has set overnight I'll start painting.

Meantime , here is an example of a fort with bastion instead of blockhouse. If I can find which fort this is and thus where I got the picture from, I'll add credits.  Thank you to Annonymous for letting me know that this is Fort Joseph in Michigan a French furtrading post .The illustration can be found at http://www.wmich.edu/fortstjoseph/about/history.html   I must have looked at 50 fort sites on line this winter as well as checking books and I was sure it was a western one but hadn't labelled the picture and was having trouble finding it again.

Reconstruction or destruction?

My old grenadiers, shiny and red at last!

I've finally finished refitting my old 30mm British grenadiers. At last they are sporting red coats and "real" grenadier caps and I have to say that they look better as glossy toy soldiers than they ever did as military miniatures. That's the last battalion of the old guys. There are 4 left overs that I could convert to a company of light infantry if I wanted to do the work of cutting down the coats and caps but I'll leave them for now, I've been eyeing a selection Willie and Scruby SYW & AR rangers, light infantry and Indians. In the meantime, I'm over due to get back to work on Fort MacDuff for Huzzah!

Its a good thing that I'm getting farther and farther into Toy Soldier mode. Trying to turn this old Barzso 54mm Davy Crocket fort into a usable prop for a 40mm 1812 game is even more trouble than I expected which is rare. In many ways it would of course have been easier to start from scratch but I am determined to make some use of it even if it is glue resistant.

I did have a reasonably easy conversion laid out until I realized just how much real estate the finished thing would occupy. OK for the main event but this is a game about Indians in the woods more so than the fort so I need to keep the foot print as small as practical. Forts are one thing that really test the imagination of 40mm gamers. Many of these frontier forts were tiny, given the ground scale I need to employ, the square bastion is not an reasonable size for a fort like Stevenson all by itself. but looks nothing like a stockade. I don't have the dimensions for Fort Meigs but it was unusually large, something like 9 acres and on the plans is long and narrow not square. A few calculations show that something like 6" x 15" or perhaps 8" x 12" would be not unreasonable for a foot print. That would have to include several blockhouses and batteries as well as log curtain walls, quarters and a ditch. OK for use with 10mm figures but its not going to work for 40's. Doing Marx Fort Apache style blockhouses that perch on a corner of the stockade was a tempting thought but at the end of the day it looks like I'll have to make do with one  vertical log blockhouse/bastion.

Remnants of the  Barzso wilderness refuge, practical meets proportion.

The bastion itself is a problem. The standard sort of square, roofed, horizontal log cabin construction blockhouse was used by both sides but the British  usually put them inside the walls while the Americans used them for corner bastions and gatehouses. The British used open palisaded corner bastions which is basically what the Barzso fort had although the angles are wrong. I looked at building a proper blockhouse and may do so yet but since the darned thing should only about 1"  square from a  ground scale angle while being big enough to fold a 40mm gun and crew plus infantry,  its going to take some compromises which I haven't worked out yet.  The roof also tend to make it awkward to handle the toy soldier garrison. At least my unlikely compromise is a formidable fortification holding 2 guns and a dozen toy soldiers with all around defence should the perimeter of the fort be breached..

Then there is the ditch. This seems to have been major obstacle in several cases, deep and fraised or combined with an abatis. The abatis might work but the combination of ditch and toy soldier stockade just looks wrong and would just distort the ground scale even more.  I think I won't waste any more time on ditch ideas, it can be assumed and built into any assault rules.

So there we are, I'm only using barely 1/2 of the original fort though I've destroyed it thoroughly in the process of experimenting. The result should be small enough to not dominate the table and give the impression of a stockade while holding 6 x 8 man companies of 40mm troops. Hope for their sake that it doesn't rain, there doesn't appear to be room for tents let alone barracks!