Here are some pictures of my most recent board, a truncated (4’x4′) street scene representing the interior of Unter-Innsbruck, which has been the locus of much fighting in our Weird War II Hollow Earth Campaign. While wargames inevitably focus on the military figures and hardware, I wanted to call out the civilian items here, as they really make the scene.
Here is the layout. If you’re wondering why it’s truncated, it’s because I didn’t have enough suitable buildings to make it look good on the usual 6’x4′ table. The compressed space ended up being plenty big and increased the intensity of the fighting.
A couple of the buildings are HO scale factories I bought from the discard pile of my train club. They are, of course, out of scale, but unless you notice the doors they look pretty good because they are so large.
In particular, I wanted to call attention to the two pre-painted MDF buildings from Micro Art Studios near the bridge. These are of excellent quality, easy to put together, and coming prepainted makes them a good buy at about $40/each. They don’t look as good as a building with, for example, genuine 3D roof shingles or wall texture, but the amount of work saved by not having to paint them is worth the trade-off. You can’t see it in the picture here, but they also offer a great advantage over all my other buildings, whether handmade or 3D printed: you can remove the outer walls to reveal the base, which is a rubble strewn ruin. Anyone who has destroyed a building with an artillery bombardment knows how useful that is.
The next pictures are vignettes, rather than genuine game footage, but I wanted to show off these Solido 1/43rd scale 1930s and 1940s cars I picked up for $2/each at the local flea market. They, too, are out of scale, but for the most part look pretty good against the bulky 28mm miniatures, which are probably closer to 1/52 or 1/50 than the 1/56th they are billed as.
I intended test out the ability of infantry and walkers with hands to improvise obstacles and create cover for themselves (something suggested in the Konflikt ’47 rulebook, but never detailed), but alas it never came up in the game itself. We’ll see how it works out when I play the follow on scenarios using the Nuts! Weird War 2 ruleset.
One response to “Picturesque Street Scenes”
Great looking table. Those cars look pretty good.