Omnia Parata*, Playmobil Coliseum base is completed!

      Having narrowly survived an invasion of grandchildren over the weekend I got right back to work on the coliseum base. In discussion with Kevin he suggested that the surface was too irregular. A quick overcoat of sand and wallboard compound toned down the texture and I got back to painting.

Basing a Playmobil Coliseum Part IV A splash of paint and a bit of sand

      With August flying past at break-neck speed I poured my free time into the Coliseum Project. I finished the pitfall traps and got them painted and then betook myself to the sand bucket and drew forth a ration of sand. A neck and shoulder straining hour later the arena floor was coated in paint and grit. I have to wait until tomorrow for the paint to dry to see how it looks, but I'm confident that this undertaking is nearly done.

 

I made another liner for the large pit, this shows the door has dropped inward so that anyone on the lid has now been deposited at the bottom of the pit, I'm going to make different floors for this rather than build three more inserts; a snake pit, a bear pit and set of spikes

Basing a Playmobil Coliseum Part III or the Pitfalls of Pit-traps

     Continuing with the mission to complete the Playmobil Coliseum as quickly as possible (so I can get back to my tower for the Angry Piper's Terrain Challenge) I embarked on the addition of the subterranean features that Kevin had requested; put-traps and an oversize passage to allow him to send a tiger into the arena from below. This turned out to be rather more work than I had thought it would, requiring very precise cutting and (gasp!) measurements. Happily my efforts were equal to the task.

 

I decided that a test-case was in order before I began full-scale operations

I sketched out a small pit trap on some matte board and deeply scored the lines

Basing a Playmobil Coliseum Part II

       Having glued the blue board in place using a combination of wood glue (my trusty friend Titebond) and hot glue I got down to the business of hardening the surface. As much of a fan as I am of blue board as a building material I do have to admit that large expanses of it get dinged up pretty badly if it isn't protected somehow. My first thought was to put a thin layer of Durham's Water Putty over the entire surface, but, with nearly twelve square feet of surface, that would have added immensely to the weight. I opted for covering the surface with a layer of wood glue and cardstock; this has worked very well on my larger pre-dreadnought models and adds very little to the overall weight.

 

after I had glued down the cardstock I added a layer of irregularly shaped construction paper pieces to hide the joint lines of the cardstock, I ran out of plain construction paper and had to raid my granddaughter's supply, thus the pink areas, the corners are going to be where the players are rolling dice so I reinforced those areas with a triangle of matte board

Basing a Playmobil Colesium, Part I

 

normally they look like this

     A little while back my good friend Kev (of Zodani Commando fame)  told me that he had seen a great looking gladiator game that used the Playmobil Coliseum as a playing space. He showed me photos of the game that he had seen at Adepticon that looked great. He told me that he had ordered the coliseum and asked if I would be interested in building a base for it. Kev is a really cool guy and I love a terrain project so I said yes. Today he dropped it off and I got started as soon as I got home.

 

a photo of the game that inspired all this....

Second Story Man......

     No. I'm not planning on a career as a catburglar, I finally got around to detailing the stonework on the second story of my tower project for the Angry Piper's terrain project.

 

all six panels laid out together

 

and then in place on the lower half of the tower,

 now "all that is left" is the interior, floors. roof and crenelations around the upper edge

Army Lists for One Hour Wargame Napoleonic Rules Mods

     These are a first prototype of the type of army list I'm thinking about. No points values; just suggested values for the more common troops types. We are concentrating on the Peninsular War right now so there are just three lists so far. I need to do some research on the Portuguese before I am confident putting together an early list for them. Later I will update for the changes in the forces as time passed, and I will add minor forces such as The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies or German allies of the French.

Challenge Accepted

  
     I was so stoked about the Angry Piper's Terrain Challenge that I started at midnight and worked until 2:30am on this little project. As usual blueboard and my faithful friend Proxxie were involved. I wanted a castle big enough to be used as both a tabletop feature and used in RPG as a model that we can play inside. I was also looking for something decidedly different looking.

 

a nice, large piece that doesn't take up too much table space

I took a challenge.........

       I was fishing around on the interwebs and I spotted this; Dead Dick's Tavern August Terrain Challenge   Being a pathological terrain builder I thought that this was a perfect fit. So I went and signed up. I will be documenting this adventure (as I have with so many other projects) here on the blog. But take a second and pop over to the Tavern and look around a bit, interesting stuff there.

One Hour Wargame Napoleonic Rules Mods

     A goodly number of people have inquired about these rules and, rather than emailing them out individually, I figured it would be easier to cut and paste them onto the blog.

     Be aware that this is still VERY MUCH A WORK IN PROGRESS.  As such there are lots of gaps and a whole bunch of things missing (like charts and diagrams and sample army lists). Please feel free to treat this as a toolkit or idea platform. As I generate charts, diagrams, examples of play and further definitions they will be posted. These will be in a different color text to catch your eye!

Napoleonic Wargame using (heavily modified) One Hour Wargame AAR

      The Housemartin showed up a little while ago with a set of rules called One Hour Wargames and some modifications that he had put together to give it a more Napoleonic feel. A decent set of Napoleonic rules being one of the "Holy Grails" of wargaming (lucky dice being one of the others) I was instantly intrigued. We set up a test game and were quite pleased with the results. A few more tests,  and a few more tweaks. and we were even happier with what we had in hand. We are still refining the idea (and I hope to get The Housemartin to authorize a "final version" of the modifications for publication soon) but I'm satisfied enough with the basic mechanics to provide an after action report on one of our games. This scenario can be played with any other Napoleonic rule-set which has the infantry battalion as a basic maneuver unit.

Dirt Cheap Mini Bases

what treasures does this battered metal case hold?

      I will admit it; I prowl local garage sales looking for things that I can use in wargaming. Sometimes things are obvious; unbuilt plastics kits, "those old toy soldiers", toy dinosaurs, other times you have to think outside the box, or maybe inside it. I stumbled across these almost by accident, the sturdy metal box is what caught my eye (having once -as a teenager at a garage sale- purchased three Colt M-1911A1s under similar circumstances when I was just trying to buy their cool wooden boxes; wow, did my Dad freak out!) so I peered inside to see what deserved such protection; poker chips! I have never been much of a gambler so I have no need of poker chips but, when I picked them up I noticed the weight, they are possessed of a nice heft. The price of two dollars made them nearly free and the fact that I was looking at something on the order of two hundred perfectly round, 39mm size, hefty discs meant that I was going to be all set for miniature bases for quite some time.

 

I suppose the box might even come in handy

 

the perfect size for 28mm figures

 (of which I have several thousand in need of paint and bases)