Benouville the game. Step 1 - the map

Having decided on the subject matter for my game for OML2 & compiled the relevant reading material, the next obvious step was to go about preparing the table and looking at what needed to be made anew & what could be sourced from items already in my collection.

First up I thought a visit to modern day Benouville would be a good place to start. I've been lucky enough to visit Normandy six times, but have never looked in depth at any particular site so, a "virtual" visit and walkabout (don't you just love that?) on Google Earth was in order.

I quickly identified this as the area I was trying to cover

 

All well & good, but this is MODERN Benouville. So, swiftly to the rescue was pal Jamie, a photographer who happens to have a library of contemporary air reconnaissance shots all over Normandy. He came up with this....

 



 

 

So, I had a bit of a play & managed to overlay the wartime image onto the current view which helped hugely to identify which features were in period.

 

 

 



By toggling the overlay on & off, I could quickly create a rough plan of the battlefield.

 

This would give me the rough framework I needed to identify items I already owned & how best to re-purpose them. Then I took a 'walk' around the village taking particular note of the look of the buildings, walls, distances etc. It turned out that I'd need to create some orchards, about 4 feet of walls (including some custom pieces for between buildings & most importantly, four new project specific buildings.