Benouville the game - Step 2 the buildings (1)

Having established the draft plan I looked for some inspiration & decided to actually have a "test-run" to set up what I already had & take some photos to actually gauge the job ahead. I found myself on a Saturday with no football & an urge to create so I moved some bits about & came up with this:

From here I could much better visualise what tasks lay ahead & formulate an order in which to proceed. As I realised soon after, there's a lot wrong in this photo, but it was a fun exercise so what the heck! If nothing else, I had a rough size for the orchards, I'd selected buildings for the 'new builds' & realised just how much I wasn't happy with the track roads I had....they'd HAVE to be changed. So as a last bit of fun I did some filter tinkering for a flavour shot:

A while later, after poring over the layout, I re-visited my knock-up plan & the 1944 air shot & altered the plan to take in the changes I'd decided upon:

The new buildings at A & B  I could make up & base pretty much as pictured at the top. but the new additions at C & D were small "one & a half storey" cottages with dormer windows which I didn't own anything suitable for, so some thought and improvisation would be needed. The buildings marked in red were outside the road area & therefore not critical for the scenario victory conditions. I had decided that I could already do L & J from 'stock' & would look to make up N, O & M later when the more pressing stuff was out of the way.

So, in no particular order the scenery tasks were:

The 4 new buildings
The orchards
Sort the tracks
Build a garden for building E
repaint the roofs of F
Walls & hedges (now I had a better idea of lengths).

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.



Seeing both sides

As the research into my Benouville scenario has kicked into overdrive & following the news from Amazon that my long awaited book by Feuchtinger on 21st Panzer Div. is ONCE AGAIN delayed beyond the point where it'll be used for this project (now 18 months overdue), work has begun in earnest with the sources I have to compile as much information from the German perspective. All these books contain 'snippets' on the action around Benouville, but I can't help thinking the whole thing would have been made easier by a good account in one place (which I happen to know for certain is in the missing book). Ho hum. Well, it's on with these for now then.........

To be fair, there's some pretty good stuff to be going on with in the bottom book too.

Zombicide Kickstarter

Last year I became one of the MANY gamers to be caught up in the phenomenon that is Kickstarter, backing a number of projects including Empire of the Dead from West Wind, Heroes of Normandie from DPG, Achtung Cthulhu from Modiphius and one I'm very much looking forward to arriving AvP from Prodos Games (more of that later).

Much to my surprise on Saturday morning, I received a parcel containing the second half of my Kickstarter for the excellent board game Zombicide (I'd had no notification that it was on it's way, that only coming the day AFTER the delivery!)

Having had a few mixed try-outs at the scenarios in the game proper ranging from fairly easy victories to total annihilation of the survivors in short order including one on a club night at Wyvern Wargamers where Stu (of http://dusttears.blogspot.co.uk/) had characteristically stabbed EVERYONE in the back once again!

I 'm looking forward to trying out some games using the new characters which include everyone from John Cleese to Howard Walowitz from Big Bang Theory via a scary looking clown called Mr. Honk.

A bumper crop of new brains for the horde to chase down

 

 

Expect an AAR or two to follow as the dust settles here after the upcoming event. Probably to include yet more exploits of Stu the "team player".

OML2 A Bridge to Lard June 14th 2014

As previously mentioned, last year we at Wyvern Wargamers http://wyvernwargamers.org.uk ran a day long event called Operation market Larden (OML for short) solely dedicated to the rules produced by TooFatLardies which are highly popular among the club membership. It went rather well so we decided as long as it's supported we'll try & make it an annual occurrence!

This year will see 9 games depicting everything from Napoleonic naval run by one half of TFL Nick Skinner, to Cold War run by Lard Approved penman Nick Overland (you don't have to be called Nick to run a game at the event BTW) with hopefully some cracking eye-candy on show into the bargain. Among the highlights will be Rich Clarke himself running his Chain of Command 'Le Port' game http://toofatlardies.co.uk/blog/?p=2559 , Sidney Roundwood's truly epic 'Verdun' which began about here(?) http://sidneyroundwood.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/and-so-it-begins.html & an adaption of Sharpe Practice for The Indian Mutiny in a  scenario called 'Saving Mrs. Ryan' run by Simon Walker. The proximity to the anniversary of the D-Day Landings will also be well served by an IABSM rendering of 'Omaha Beach' by Mike Whittaker.

With the aforementioned anniversary of D-Day in prominence, It also featured heavily in my choice for the game I'll be putting on for the day with the aid of chum/neighbour/oppo Paul of http://movealongnownothingtoseehere.blogspot.co.uk/ As I've previously mentioned, my absolute favourite in wargaming is WW2 & in particular Normandy as a theatre. That all coupled with the enormous popularity of the Chain of Command rules made this a 'no-brainer'.

Purely by coincidence, while Rich Clarke's B Company 7th Para Btn are slogging it out for Le Port, just along the road our A Company will be desperately trying to hold the southern aspect of the Orne Bridgehead against 21st Panzer Div. in BENOUVILLE this time in 15mm!

Some of the reading material I've been using to get the Paras perspective of the battle

 

Some of the individual accounts surrounding this particular fight are truly amazing & bring home what a close run & 'up close & personal' encounter it turned out to be. I sincerely hope to capture that feeling for the players when I attempt to transfer it to the table top. Future blog posts will concentrate heavily on my efforts to bring about the game.

 

Projects for the year ahead 2014 (1) Gladiators

Salutant vos, qui morituris!

After a long, exhaustive search for the 'right' rules, I finally took the plunge and bought a set that I'd liked the look of after reading the reviews. The purchase was delayed somewhat as, after making my choice, they disappeared from sale at North Star http://northstarfigures.com/ & everywhere else! Still, watching out for them turned out to have been worthwhile & a set was duly secured on eBay for a tenner (RRP £17).....bargain!

I'm intending to keep this as a small "side-project" (low figure count etc. making that ideal) & don't have any plans to do daft things like build a 3D arena.....while, not yet anyhow ;)

I'll be using a bunch of 28mm figures I picked up from West Wind way back at Warfare show back in about 2002. I don't see them available anymore but I think they were part of the Gladiator Wars range also sold by Old Glory. I'll post some photos of how they're coming on when the project finally finds wings after OML2.

See, it's not ALL Lard ya know!

Operation Market Larden

Last year on June 9th, our club http://wyvernwargamers.org.uk/ hosted an all day event dedicated solely to the games from the TooFatLardies stable (there are enough of us at the club steeped in the ways of the Lard) & were lucky enough to be granted a visit by the author himself Rich Clarke.

Our esteemed guru puts Matt Slade (of Glenbrook Games) http://www.glenbrookgames.co.uk/ Roman Bublik & Nathan(?) through their paces in his game of Chain of Command, which was due to debut later in the year.

 

All-in-all there were 35 of us playing in 8 different games covering a good selection of TfL games including 3 from the 'Lard Approved' program (where budding authors could road-test their offerings & if successful be 'published'). About 25 of those attending reconvened in the evening for the obligatory curry. It was deemed enough of a success that we're doing it all again this year on Saturday June 14th!

 

 

The 'tea-break' card was played & commemorative cakes appeared!