I hope everyone had a merry Christmas, and I hope all of you Jewish folk enjoy the rest of Hannukah. Personally, I had a great Christmas, as my girlfriend gave me a Vallejo 72-color paint set with case (!). Meanwhile, at SPG we've been busy at work on the scenario table for Templecon 2012! The graveyard (as of yet unnamed) has been progressing nicely and today I have some teaser pictures to share with you about our progress thus far. The current deadline is Thursday this week, so that it can be transported to the LGS for playtesting, and it looks like we are following along according to schedule. Take a look!
As you can see from the picture at the top of the page, we have successfully attached the hills and installed the lights in their proper locations. To ensure a fair game, we used yarn to divide the board into four quarters, and determined the layout of where each of the grave markers would be placed.
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Deployment zones staring at each
other. |
There will be a total of 30 graves per half, with an even distribution of 15 per quarter. Note that I added 5 more per half after the pictures above were taken, to have a more natural distribution, bringing it to 30 per half.
Once the grave marker locations were finalized, the markers were traced using a sharpie, to make sure their locations stayed consistent for digging.
Then an exacto-knife was used to cut out the shape of the grave into the foam.
With the help of some expensive tools, the graves were dug-out.
With the help of a vacuum, the graves were cleaned of any debris, and viola!
This way, the grave markers can be placed on top of the grave, for easy removal (digging) or flipping (protecting)!
The copplestone road has also been completed and looks pretty good! The effect was achieved very easily (although it was
quite time-consuming). All we did was use a blade to carve out the desired shapes of stones and then used the back-end of a paintbrush to push down on the cuts between the stones, making the middle part of the stone more raised compared to the grooves.
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| A completed road! |
Some stone-textured spraypaint was purchased from the hardware store and will be sprayed onto the roads. Now, most spraypaint eats away at foam, so I had to do a test piece to make sure that didn't happen. Success! No eaten foam! This allowed me to go ahead with a sample of what the road will look like painted.
We will use some watered-down black paint to paint into the cracks between the stones and then drybrush with white paint, to pick up on the raised texture.
Finally, we attached the bases of the trees to the tops of the hills and on other various spots on the board (for aesthetics). The trees will be painted and stored separately for easy storage, transport, and removal during play.
So far so good! We've begun painting the structures and we anticipate we'll be ready by Thursday. We will be coating the board today with our wood glue + sawdust mixture for the ground, painting the rest of the structures and roads (once I get more stone spraypaint), and paint our grave markers. I'm really pleased with how the table is progressing!
