Starting the terrain

Last night, Steve and I began building the terrain for this project. At present it looks like a mess of EPS, newspaper and various odds and ends of rubbish that were lying around the house looking useful. If you are interested, the basic building materials are:

9mm MDF for the baseboards;
EPS for the frames and basic contours;
Any old offcuts of EPS and expanded polystyrene for building up the interior of each board;
Newspaper and various bits from my paper and cardboard recycling bins for building up the contours further;
Some of my older t-shirts that my wife thinks are past their best;
Plaster; and
Sand.

This should give us terrain boards based on the contours on the OS map. We then just have to paint it and add flock to make it look like an English field on a cold day with a scattering of snow on it. The question remains whether we should attempt to simulate the snow by rigging up a snow dispenser over the table too!

There are no photos of beautiful finished terrain yet, but you can expect to see an 18' by 4' (that's 5.4m by 1.2m) table made of recycled rubbish at Salute, which will be our first outing. I plan to give Peter at Baccus a detailed terrain-building description with photos for his site when it is done and also to post some photos of the finished product here, but in the meantime I'm afraid that you will have to use your imaginations. Sorry.

Nano-Towton

No time to refight the battle with 20000 or more figures? Not enough space? You need new, improved Nano-Towton(tm)! Nano-Towton uses amazing miniaturised technology to permit you to refight the battle of Towton in an area as small as 2' x 2' (600mm x 600mm). Want to know how to do it? Download the orders of battle and special rules here. You will also need the Basic Impetus rules, which are freely downloadable here.

The idea is that you can have some semblance of a refight using armies of only around ten stands each in a short space of time. I chose to do this with Basic Impetus because they are free and I prefer them to DBA.

Warwick's Completed Contingent

Well I've finally finished Lord Ogle and Sir Thomas St.Leger's contingents.
So here is the finished battle.

Cheers

Steve

Progress So Far

This is where I'm up to with my second command, Warwick's

Hopefully I should soon have those final 8 levy stands sorted out. Then it's crack on with terrain, so nothing much then.

Cheers

Steve S

Show Diary - see us at Salute

Salute - 16th April 2011

The Rather Large Towton Project is now booked in at Salute 2011. We hope that you will be able to come along and see the game (and be impressed). We look forward to talking to any and all while there.

The Worlds at Derby 2010

Well, Derby has been and gone and we had an excellent weekend. Saturday was fantastically busy with people coming and talking to us constantly, so we only got one game completed, but it was a Yorkist victory, which boded well for the rest of the weekend. We completed three games on the Sunday, which was quieter, with the last game being a surprise Lancastrian victory.

The games were characterised by a number of amusing turns of fate. The first game saw most of the battle fought in the sun! We rolled each turn to see if there was a clear spell, during which the Lancastrian guns might fire, and the Lancastrians rolled rather a lot of them during that game. We also rolled to see if Lord Grey would change sides when Edward reached him. The die roll was weighted towards him changing sides, but he only actually did so in one game! He did die rather a lot though. See if you can spot how often he is surrounded in the pictures below.

The comments we received were very supportive and positive, even from the "I could never paint anything that small" brigade, of whom only a very few were present. Thank you to everyone that dropped by and let us talk at them! ;-) It was great to meet up with various friends while we were there, and it was great to meet a whole bunch of new people, whom I only know from the internet.

Here is a selection of shots of the game in case you did not make it to see us. Click the images for larger versions.

Our 'stall':


The Yorkists begin their first advance of the weekend while Steve looks up some rules:


Lord Grey surrounded and about to die heroically:


Leigh contemplates the Lancastrian situation:


The Yorkists swarm the Lancastrian lines:


The view from the Lancastrian lines at the start of the second game:


The second game progresses as the Yorkists advance through the mud:


Crunch!:


Two views of the melee:



The Yorkists gain a foothold in the Lancastrian camp:


While some of their troops rout (look for the two D markers) other Yorkist contingents have gained the camp and turned on the Lancastrian flanks:


Less good times for the Yorkists. Most of their army is routing and the camp seems secure:


The face of a victorious Lancastrian commander:

Just how far do I have to go still?

In an idle moment (yeah, right, like I have time for idle moments!) I set out my two armies for the Towton project. This was depressing for me in a number of ways! Firstly, the size of the armies did not look that great laid out as they were on a couple of card tables. Secondly, the size of the unpainted elements of my armies looked huge, laid out as they were on a couple of card tables! I also don't actually have enough bases for my armies yet and had to reuse them so that I could show both armies in photos. Time to pop along to Tony at East Riding Miniatures sometime soon. Good job he lives just down the road from me. Fortunately, the Yorkist army is actually further along than it appears, because two friends, John and Brendan, are kindly helping me by painting a contingent each. I hope to con Steve (not Yorkie) into helping with the Lancastrian army, but I suspect that will cost me. Click the pictures below for larger view and remember that each army is set up on a two foot frontage. When we deploy the full size armies for Towton with everyone's contributions, they will be deployed on a frontage of nearly thirteen feet (approximately four metres for the imperially-challenged). The table will be eighteen feet long by four feet wide, although we are debating whether we should make it six feet wide to give a bit more depth for the Lancastrians to rout in.

The Yorkist Army


The Lancastrian Army