Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Playtest #1


bleh.

I wish that I had known in advance that my supposed partner in the EYLAU game was not going to be able to take part.

To date I still have not heard from him.

I went over early on Saturday with my table and all of my terrain parts, so that we could set-up the two table combination for the first time. He was not at home, no note, no call, no indication of what had happened or why he was unavailable.

So I dragged by materials back home.



I busied myself with the layout of the French Grand Armee, so that I could confirm that I had enough minis (the 'green gaps' you see in the picture are for the troops still under production). Hoping that my partner would call to inform me that I could come over or at least what was going on.

What did come was a call to get more firewood. (which we needed)

I set aside all the minis and materials for the next 5 hours and humped wood, splitting some and stacking it for use this week.

Returning to the table after dinner I was able to set out the map completely and got some troops onto it for the first series of some photos.



I have been working on the 'snow' imagery concepts, I am interested what viewers here think of the first attempt at scale and if you have ever done snow scenes before, what worked for you?







Sunday was an attempt to have a 'new' player veiw the materials and comment, sadly this person was also not able to attend.

So I busied the day with the 'labels' for the unit tags. I had planned on using 'sticky' printer paper, but remembered that I had 'magnetic' printer paper!

LONG LIVE MAGNETICS!

So I have printed out and attached to the metal unit and command tags a magnetic ID.

Cheers

3 comments:

marinergrim said...

I like the kapok idea (it is kapok isn't it? The sort of stuffing that you get in coats and the like). looks good.

Alternatives are flour (way too messy and you never ever get rid of all of it from your flocked bases - trust me I know).

Salt - has to be rock or sea salt and in fairly large quantiites though. so as long as you don't mind the bad luck from spilling all that salt you're okay. (We used to use the salt after the game for preserving fish since you have to rehydrate the fillet before cooking anyway).

Bluebear Jeff said...

I just wish to point out that I was not either of the players Murdock refers to. He knew in advance that I was staying home with my wife (who has pneumonia right now).

He puts a lot of work into his games -- providing all of the painted troops and terrain plus lots of playaids. It is really unfortunate that he had people bail on his first playtest.


-- Jeff

MurdocK said...

Thanks Grimbsy Mariner,

I also like the 'batting', I have not heard it called kapok, that is from some left over pillows materials that my wife had. I used it under the Russians. So far they are the only ones done this way and I have some thin foam from underlay of laminate flooring that I plan to try out on the French. If it does not look well in the pictures then I have more of the kapok to re-base the minis with. I really like how fast the magnetic bases can be re-based!

I was planning to stay away from things like flour and salt, since the minis are stored in an unheated space they tend to get a little bit of condensation on them when transported indoors for games, this would make stuff like flour into paste and salt will begin to rust my new steel bases.

As it stands I have found some 'snow' materials from woodland senics folks, I tried it on a few Russians and found that I could completely remove the materials allowing the troops to return to summery green quite quickly.

Cheers