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Gettysburg - the Madness returns

 

 

Peter Berry

Part 1 - The Creeping Menace

Following the terrible bouts of madness that drew my friend Derek to the horror that was Leipzig-Lite - an attempt to stage the largest battle of the Napoleonic Wars on a four foot square table in under an hour, I had assumed that the affliction had been purged from him and that his soul could finally be at peace.

Alas, my hopes were shattered at our next meeting. One look into those eyes were enough to convince me that this was a man who was once again staring into the abyssal pits of megalomania. In knew in an instant that the Madness was still within him, if anything, even stronger and more powerful than before.

'Derek', I said, 'You've been at those bloody eldritch tomes again, haven't you? How many times have I told you? Get a Playstation or start stamp collecting. It will all end in tears again!'

'But', came the croaked reply, 'I have seen a wonderful vision, passed down to me from vistas you cannot begin to imagine with your feeble intellect.'

I know at that stage that I was not going to like what was to come.

'We can do Gettysburg. All THREE DAYS! And in 40 minutes! Ai! Ai! Ai.'

At the sound of those terrible ululations I fled the room. My thoughts clouded and it was in a daze that I stumbled through the door, not knowing how I managed to shut it behind me or collapse into the street outside, finally lapsing into blessed unconsciousness. But it was too late. He had passed the Madness on...

 

Part 2 - Reality sets in.

Okay. I admit it. I exaggerated a little. Following the great success of the Leipzig game, it was decided that the Baccus Reduced Great Battles of History team needed a fresh challenge. As an ACW reenactor, Derek fancied doing Bull Run, but after a lot of soul searching and debate, it was decided to go for Gettysburg as being more iconic and more of a challenge. As a result a couple of months after the initial decision was made, I was presented with this:

 

To those of you familiar with the battlefield, you'll spot that we've had to muck around quite a bit with the layout of the original in order to get all the important features in place. It may annoy the purists amongst us, but it fits within our working premise. We are not attempting an exact reproduction of the original - more an attempt to give a flavour of the action within a limited area and time scale.

It was time to face reality and start getting on with things. As with the first game, Derek was to do all the figures and it was down to me to sort out the gaming board. As usual my partner in crime in all of this is my son, Chris.

What follows is a step by step diary of our ham-fisted efforts to turn Derek's map into a workable game board. How difficult could this really be? After all, we'd had the experience of building the first one to help us....

 

Part 3 - Every journey starts with the first step.

Which in our case was a visit to the local timber merchants to buy some sheet mdf and some 2x1 timber. As with Leipzig we started by assembling two game boards each measuring 4 foot by 2 foot, securely braced by a timber framework. This proved to be a fairly quick and easy job. The next job was to transfer the sketch map to the board. It was at this stage that we could both get a handle on the scale of the job and start to really decide how we were going to tackle the various aspects of the work.

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There will be significant differences between our approach to this build and that of the previous one. These are partly due to experience gained and also to the different nature of the two battlefields.

  • Gettysburg needs much more in terms of relief. You could not do this job without representing Cemetery and Seminary ridges. However, because of the changed scale of the battlefield, we have to get the balance right between showing areas of higher ground and not letting them become major obstacles. As a result we'll be keeping vertical relief very much understated. Each contour will only be 2mm high and these will be heavily sculpted and chamfered.
  • We will be using buildings and trees designed for 2mm models. We decided that using 6mm equivalents would be quite jarring and dominate the battlefield too much.
  • Rivers will be painted on rather than shown in relief.

I am typing this all with great confidence at this stage. I have no idea how it's going to turn out, so if you are the sort of person who likes watching Car Crash TV then this little project should make compulsive reading.

And at this point, it's time to end the first entry. As I'd forgotten the jigsaw I couldn't cut out the hills to add to the board as we'd planned, so you'll have to wait until the next exciting installment to find out how we get on.

 

Part 4 - 'What do we do now?'

There were were facing looking at this table with the arcane markings and runes inscribed on it's surface. 'What do we do now?', I ventured. 'I dunno, what DO we do now?' came the reply from Chris. 'I was rather hoping you were going to be more helpful than that.' I replied, at which he just shrugged and put this earphones back in and jacked up the volume in the i-player.

'Hills', I said. 'We'll do the hills.' And that, gentle readers is exactly what we did do.

The hills were cut out of 2mm mdf. We'd decided to keep the relief quite low so this was perfect. Working from patterns which we hastily cobbled together the various shapes were extracted from the sheet of mdf with a jigsaw aided by some very useful swearing. Once the sections were cut out we sanded the edges and put a chamfer on them. A short sentence that conceals a world of pain and hardwork when you don't have the right tools. This tends to be a recurring theme in our builds...

Once sanded to perfection or there abouts the various ridges, hills, elevations, round tops and knolls were glue in place. We stepped back, took in our handiwork and the dread words were uttered... 'What do we do now?'

After much head scratching and drinking of decaff coffee, the decision was made to put the masking tape on the board which would be used to mark the grid used in playing the game. For those of you not in the know about this, go back and read the Leipzig Lite report to get the idea. Last time we had used sellotape which sounded like a great idea until it came to removing it, which caused huge problems. This time we were clever and used masking tape. The only problem we found with this is that it seems to hate sticking to mdf. However, we are stubborn and had no alternative so we cajoled and threatened the tape into place. It wasn't perfect and may yet cause problems, but for the moment, it is there. All that was left to do was to cut through the sections where a road crossed the tape. All done!

'What do we do now?'.............................. ARRRGH!

The answer was roads. This games has lots of them. Lots of them. A whole bloody network of them! We approached this problems by using fillers in squeezy tubes and like a couple of demented cakemakers we piped the road network onto the game table. This gives a very strange appearance at the moment, but will look a lot better when it is sanded flat and tidied up. This last statement is made with the confidence of a man who has yet to sand the roads flat and tidy them up....

Anyway, here is a picture of that this has left us with.

 

As we couldn't think of anything else to do we laid out the wonderful wood sections which had been produced for us by Realistic Scenics. We then marked their locations as these areas would not be sanded in the next stage of the process. I decided to take a couple of pics with some of the 2mm building sections from Irregular in place, as it gives an idea of where we are going with this.

 

 

By this stage, inspiration and energy were spent, so we called it a day and and went home. However, no matter what I did, those words kept flickering across my consciousness, ''What do we do now?'....

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