Can't play games - so lets build terrain !

Hi Folks

Since I last posted London has now gone into tier 4, Christmas has been cancelled and I am very grumpy. 

God this pandemic has been a real pain in the arse. 

Any way this blog is not about rantings, its about wargames. Which if you haven't noticed have been in very short supply.

With a hopeful view that we might get games going again in spring I have been looking ahead and preparing for the next set of WOTR games. In particular I need a custome table for the Battle of Towton. History tells us the battle was fought in late march yet there was a snowy blizzard across the field. So with time on my hands a new battlemat has been created.

Once again I used the technique devised for my desert battlemat (HERE). This comprised of a large plastic backed dust sheet covered with decorators caulk, paint, pva glue and sand.

The picture below shows half the mat covered in this gloop. The mat itself will be 5ft x 15ft when finished.

 With the mat covered in gloop I painted large brown patches over the ground to break up the uniform colour. Being winter and relatively cold outside there were several days between coats as each cost needed to dry before moving onto the next stage. 

Once the surface was finally dry I drybrushed the surface with cream. It was then a case of covering the whole mat in green flock.

To begin with I covered large sections in flock with a distinct pattern emerging

Once I got halfway I realised that my green moorlands of England needed to be totyally green so I filled in the brown spaces across the table apart from a few areas.

The final affect was quite pleasing and with this coat done the whole mat was sealed with diluted pva. This took a week to dry.

With the mat drying I turned my attention to the snow covering. I tried plenty of different options including snow flock, bicarbonate of soda and paint. With the exception of a straight forward paint coating the others had a tendency to bleed into the green flock and end up green when sealed. This was extremely frustrating.

In the end I plumped for straightforward acrylic white paint across the field. This gave the light snow effect I was looking for.

The below picture I think gives quite a good chilly effect.

A close up with some of my archers. I am not going to redo the bases on the figures

With the mat complete I could turn my attention to the other features of the battlefield. These include an extensive wood that will hide a Lancastrian ambush party. The trees were all sourced from ebay.

First up we have some plain trees...

and I have a large box of snow covered trees just waiting for such a battlefield

The plain trees were covered in pva and dipped into snow flock. The woodland bases have been started using hardboard covered in sand and paint.

The idea is to create mixed wood bases so a test was conducted - these lookquite smart and I should have enough to cover about 3 square foot of the table.

Towton is bisected by two roads so using some off cuts of the cloth I covered these in gloop and ran some tracks into them using a toy car. The edges of the tracks will be treated in the same manner as the battlemat.

finally I needed a stream for the battle field so using some tile offcuts (spares from my river project) I have started on about 24ft of narrow water courses.

So as winter progresses I'll crack on with these and get them finished for the big game.

Take care and stay safe everybody