World War Weekend 5
Normandy: The Board
As this was an “operational” level game, I wanted the board to cover the area of Normandy that included the beaches and where much of the first couple of weeks of fighting took place, namely the area shown in the map below.
The room available in my basement for the game is quite large, but the size of the gaming table was limited by the need to be able to reach models near the center of the board. I figured that most people could reach about three feet comfortably, so a six-foot wide board was the maximum. Length was then set somewhat arbitrarily at twelve feet. I opted for assembling the board in two-foot by four-foot sections to facilitate assembly and storage.
For the terrain, I originally intended on a fully three-dimensional board using foam over particle board. The foam would be shaped with a hot knife from Hot Wire Foam Factory (http://hotwirefoamfactory.com/home.php), cutting away foam to form river banks, trenches, and other depressions, and adding foam to build up hills, bluffs, etc. I planned to glue the foam to the particle board using a foam-safe spray adhesive sold for affixing foam insulation to walls. In the past I have used cheap latex house paint mixed with sand or sawdust to color and texture foam and bare plywood to good effect, but I was intrigued by the prospect of using Woodland Scenics ReadyGrass Mats to cover the entire board. I hoped that by heating the mats and letting them conform loosely over the carved foam I would get a softer, more rounded topology than I normally get when cutting foam. However, after giving this a trial, I was dissppointed. There was no way I could heat enough of the mat at one time to allow it to soften enough for gravity alone to cause them conform to the hills, banks, bluffs, etc. on my trial board. I tried both a hair dryer and a heat gun but it just wasn’t working.
So, I opted to return to a less three-dimensional approach using 2x4 sheets of particle board, painted and/or flocked to resembled green fields, beaches, and a portion of the sea. I still used foam sheets cut with the hot knife to form hills and painted and flocked these as well. The added advantage of the “semi-3D” approach is modularity. I have a hard time getting too excited about spending dozens of hours on board that I can use only a few times before if becomes “routine” versus using a modular approach that allows me to mix and match components like hill, buildings, roads, etc.
As reality set it, I realized that, even if I defined a “town” as a collection of only two or three buildings, getting more than two of them on my board wasn’t going to happen.
I wanted a larger town to serve as a D-Day objective, which I labeled “Caen,” and at least one smaller town that the US paratroops could be tasked with capturing, which I labeled “St. Mere Eglise.” Of course in no way did the size or location of the “towns” on my board accurately reflect either of those two historic cities, but it was fun pretending.
I also wanted to include the bridge across the Caen Canal captured by the Ox and Bucks of the 6th UK Airborne (known as Pegasus Bridge). The bridge itself I fashioned from scratch out of foam core board and thin basswood. I needed a canal for it to span, but I didn’t want anything near “scale” width so I ended up painting a narrow extension of the sea from the beaches south.
In the end, I ended up with a very abstract representation of the Normandy beaches and the countryside inland.
The map of “Normandy” – North is to the left.
An overview of the board from the east, looking west.