My Blog List

My Blog List

Tuesday 2 April 2013

How to Boarding Stations

Table top gaming is base around two things models & terrain & depending on what scale your playing at can take up very little room or quiet a lot.
The system you play can also have a very big effect terrain wise & the type of terrain you'll need will be determined by the setting you choose to play in, a WWII game will more often then not will be played out over open spaces with fields, some wood' & maybe a small village this I think would certainly be true for the likes of FoW.

Tables for gaming on come in two forms modular or flat where you put the terrain down on top of them, now they both have their advantages a modular table will be done in such a way that everything blends in together & if done right will look a million dollars but will grow stale after awhile as your always fighting in that same place plus unless you have a big space for storage modular tables are really a non runner.

So the other type we have is the flat table where we put terrain on to it.
  The little table in the picture above I'm only using for this demo & the model on it is a GW 28mm scale it is in fact a 40K IG model the table is about 2 foot 6 x 2 foot, now one of the great things about a game like 40K is that the only limits to the type of terrain you can fight over is your own imagination.

Now I'm not going to go into the type of terrain that most games of 40K take place in, but one of the things that a lot of 40K players dream of doing is fighting a boarding action on a spaceship or fighting inside some kind of industrial complex.
So the type of terrain we need for this is made up of large areas & corridors, now if we do this like the modular table after a few games it will feel stale, we could make up some rooms & corridors that are interchangeable but can be a lot of stuff to store.   

There is however another way to do this which I'm going to explore in this post, now the stuff I'll be using to form the rooms & corridors is not painted as I was jut trying this out to see how it would work so it's like a bit of a live post in that regard.
So we'll start with cutting our walls.
These are 3" wide & different lengths is 3mm thick & here's a link to where you can get it or all the information on it.    http://www.365plastics.ie/index.php/plastic-sheets/foam-pvc-sheets.html

Now you can add some detail to the walls if you wish it would improve the look of things but it's more work.

A few little bits like those in the picture above will add greatly to the over all feel of the terrain when everything is painted but that's not what were after in this post.

I next cut a strip of clear plastic 1" wide & then cut it 1x1 pieces & then glued them to the bottem of the wells as stands.

 
 When doing this keep the pieces bach about 3/4 of an inch from the ends so that when one wall is butting up to another that the plastic pieces  won't end up on top of one another.

 As you can see your walls sections work out nicely for creating rooms & corridors & by adding some things inside them we create the different parts of the ship.

 
 
Then using the same wall pieces -1 I made a completely different lay out.

 So such a simple design gives us plenty of options, you can of course add more detail in the way of blast doors & raised walkways plus the more different length wall you make the more options you'll have.

This type of terrain can be used in many other game systems as well such as infinity or tomorrow's war.

 When doing table's like these for 40K however it does mean that certain units can not be used but that can be half the fun of playing these type of missions.

Playing a killteam game can make a nice change from your everyday game of 40K

 & can be every bit as challenging.

This system also has another big advantage over the other two you talked about earlier in the post & that's storage.

With the exception of the longest wall section all the other pieces I used in the pictures above to make the interior of the spaceship on a 2 foot 6 x 2 foot table takes up only a small part of the box which means enough walls to fill a 6x4 table could be put into the box & not take up to much room on a shelf.

 So I think we can safely say our little experiment worked out fairly well & is one I'll be adding to the things to do list.         

No comments:

Post a Comment