Home is where your sniper is

So this weekends efforts have largely revolved around me expanding my housing situation and creating a more impressive village than the previous efforts of two resin houses and whatever I've been able to cobble together from cardboard and masking tape.

Like I've mentioned above, my housing terrain is currently a couple of resin buildings in 15mm scale and to flesh that out I've built a house out of cardboard, and used mount board as a foot print to mark out other buildings. Now whilst they have been a pretty expedient solution for starting to game, they don't really look very pretty, they also don't offer multiple floors for your troops to utilise, not to mention it's quite hard remembering in the heat of battle that you can't "see" through a house when there isn't a physical presence to remind you.

So with that in mind I headed for the internet with the intention of adding to the stock of resin buildings that I own. In the process of looking at various resin models from a few manufacturers I also came across 4Ground pre painted MDF. Now I'm sure to many of you this won't be anything new, judging by the fact that there are many reviews of the product out there already, but they are new to me.......and I was quite intrigued

From what I can see these are priced pretty well, comparing well against pre painted resin, and not a terrible amount more than unpainted, the other big plus (for me personally) is that they look really crisp, as opposed to some resins which (in my opinion) look a little "fuzzy" in the details. But the big plus for me, is that the 4ground buildings allow ready access to all levels of the building for placement of troops. With the resins that I have, you have to pick the whole thing up if you want to place troops into the ground floor, which can be a bit of pain, to say the least.

So I ordered a few buildings that took my fancy from the 4ground website, namely:

Stone Hotel, Terrace 2, Semi 1 and Damaged Semi 3

They arrived from 4ground a few days later, well packaged in a plain, each building was in its own bag with instructions, which are a nicely printed A4 sheet with step by step picture instructions, and quite nicely included on the instruction sheet is a selection of 15mm signage, posters and propaganda. 

The buildings themselves press out of the MDF easily and with a small bit of fine grit wet & dry paper to remove the small burrs, the pieces fit together really smoothly. PVA glue to stick them together, the instructions recommend a couple of elastic bands to hold the building together while the glue dries and quite frankly that would probably be enough, given how well the buildings fit together, but I used some mini clamps just to make double sure.

All in all when they are finished, the buildings look really nice, fit well only in themselves, but also fit really well next to each other and I think that with a dozen or so of these, they will makes really nice little village set up.

To tie a village together you of course need a road, and again, I've heard good things about quite a few different roads you can buy, different ways to make your own etc etc, but in my trawling through the internet I came across this absolute gem from Toshach miniatures, which is just a set of road sections in a PDF that you can print (preferably onto light card) and has dirt road, cobble road and Tarmac/asphalt road, straights, corners, junctions and transitions between the various types. The textures are really nice and even a halfway decent printer should be able to do them justice. I cut these from the printed sheets using a straight edge and a rotary cutter, then stuck them to mount card using Pritt stick before finally trimming the card and have ended up with the beginnings of a very cheap very nice looking road system. And by cheap I mean like $5 (about £3.50) for the PDF and then the A3 sheets of mount card I purchased from The Range for 80p each. I may move onto a more textured road system later, but for now these will do just fine, and even if I do upgrade later, I won't have spent that much, the kind of money you can incidentally spend on a couple of coffees without thinking.

As a finishing touch to the road, I'm going paint the edges of the roads in a matching grey to remove the starkness of the cut edges of the mount card. With the dirt tracks I will probably leave a little border that I can then cover with static grass or similar, give it even more character

Praise The Lord and pass the ammunition

So this Sunday past was quite a productive effort, in prep for terrain-ing I've been going through my hobby cupboards and draws, gathering all the odds and sods of material that I have in various places. In doing this I came across a pre cut card model of a parish church from metcalfe models. I bought this a year or so ago as a central piece for a gaming table but was left aside as it's in HO/OO gauge I thought that it might be a bit too big for flames of war usage. At any rate on finding it buried I thought it would be a shame to just sit unbuilt so it became this weekends project.

I wish I'd had the forethought to take pictures all the way though this build so there was a better catalogue of the process but as it is I only thought to photograph the thing about half way through. The kit was put together with Pritt stick, but the instructions say you can use Uhu non solvent glue, or you could probably use PVA if you had nothing better to do but sit and watch things dry. 

The actual kit itself contains several sheets of pre printed and pre cut thick card, there are some small points where the card hasn't been completely cut through, to keep the pieces attached to the backing card, but these usual give way with a quick press or can be sliced through with a craft knife or scalpel if you refer. Some of the finer details like sections of the window archways will need you to scalpel them out rather than just push them lest you break the fine detail struts, and I found that this was best accomplished with a No. 10 blade as it has a very sharp and fine point.

The glazing for the windows is an acetate sheet, printed with "leaded" windows. Now the instructions said that these were designed to be cut with scissors, but I actually found it easier to do with a straight edge and a rotary cutter, this gave nice clean lines that were then easily glued onto the backs of the windows arches.

On the whole I found the instructions very clear and easy to follow and even things that I thought would be a right royal pain in the ass (like the buttress) were actually very simple and really quite enjoyable to construct. I did find that for some parts such as attaching the aisles to the chancel, some small spring clips ( or just spring clothes pegs if you don't have clamps to hand), we're very handy in holding two edges together whilst the Pritt took and stuck.

The whole build took me a couple of hours and several cups of tea to finish, but at no point did I find it a chore or frustrating (ok, gluing up all the aisle windows was a bit off a bore) and despite my initial misgivings about the scale of the building, it actually looks like it'll sit quite nicely on the battle field, seems about right, sat next to one of my 4ground buildings and with a sniper team on the tower roof!!

Guarding the porch entrance 

SNIPER!!

An LED candle used to try and give a little atmospheric lighting

This one is less "atmospheric" than it is on fire

Back to France

So I've decided that it might be a fun idea to try and keep a blog of my efforts to create and develop a flames of war modular terrain setup. I'm not quite sure what has sparked off my desire to build/design/collect a gaming board setup, I think that when I got my hands on the updated D-Day books (Overlord and Atlantik Wall) and the Market Garden collection I really wanted a fantastic setup to play really immersive battles on, I love the idea of pressing inland with 4 Commando and seizing the bridges on the Orne river head, pressing on to support the paras with welsh guards.