by George Banic
I had a conversation with ‘Mark Man of Tin’ on the Lone Warrior blog recently, where I mentioned I’d built a few city blocks of urban terrain to play a game based on the Battle of Fallujah. Mark indicated he’d like to see photos of the terrain, hence, some photos to illustrate the comments I’d made.
Apart from the lamp posts and figures, all terrain was scratch built, and scaled for 15mm figures, or 1/100 scale. Doors and windows were drawn in Microsoft Word, cut out and glued to the buildings as I explained in my original posts.
I also thought it would be a good idea to send something in to show that I do play other periods than just the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71)!!
Force on Force worked very well for solo play, with the player taking the role of the Marines, and the non-player insurgent units activating from various ‘Hot Spots’ or spawn points and running to the gun fight or trying to maneuver around the US troops to try to cut off elements to destroy in detail.
The game is objective based which means the insurgents can win the game by achieving their set objectives in the scenario, which worked extremely well for an asymmetric engagement. The Force on Force Fallujah supplement contains a heap of scenarios, some based on actual historic engagements and others ‘what if’ type engagements in a roughly chronological sequence to the actual battle, allowing you to play the scenario book as a campaign.
I also put my iPhone in one of the buildings playing a one hour or so urban battle soundtrack, which certainly upped the atmosphere!
Figures are by Peter Pig, with some Eureka Miniatures as well to beef up the insurgents.
Lovely layout, a great combination of realism and functionality
Thanks George – it looks the part, very evocative but also functional and practical. Thanks for sharing the picture.
G’day Martin and Mark!
Many thanks for the kind words, glad you liked the result. I’m quite happy with the way it all turned out – have to admit the hot glue gun is one of the best inventions ever for the home hobbyist!
If I’d put more thought into the project I would have made most, if not all, of the buildings able to fit within each other to save space when storing. The city block bases are basically cardboard rectangles that I plonk the buildings and other structures & scatter terrain onto. Power poles plug into little styrene tube sockets on the corners. The beauty of the cardboard city block base is that it automatically gives you a raised verge/sidewalk with the ‘road’ (I.e. underlying baseboard), and you can easily vary the size of roads/:streets/alleyways just by sliding the city block bases closer together or further apart. A key consideration for my terrain these days is storage, so I’m trying to get smarter with how I do things in that regard.
Seeing the Fallujah photos again has got me inspired to have another crack at FoF. Hopefully will be able to post an AAR in future, which will probably provide a welcome change of pace and topic to my 1870 campaign saga! I reckon there’s a fair bit of reader fatigue out there to match my writer’s fatigue!!!
Cheers
G