Terrain for Dien Bien Phu

We, in this case the Scandinavian Ladies, will have a participation game at this year’s Gothcon, and this time it will be Dien Bien Phu in 28mm scale and using the Chain of Command rules.

Thomas is the grand master of DBP and is in charge of everything, and I’m in the position of just following orders. One of the orders is to paint some Viet Cong soldiers, and they are bought and on their way (excellent stuff, that, as they can be used in pulp games also)

Painting the brown fleece to get something that looks like a muddy and shot-up field.

Another order was get some terrain finished. The best way to do that is to have a terrain-making-day and we chose a sunny and beautiful day to hole up in my cellar with MDF, filler, paint, fleece, foamboard, hot-glue gun, cork and whatnot.

The finshed thing, ready for some serious action.

An afternoon with a few tasty beers and without any burnt fingers got us (me, Thomas and Henke) a finished ground-cover and some started rice-paddies and bamboo-groves.

Thomas hot-gluing foam-board sides to cork-sheets (the excellent and cheap AVSKILD cork place mat from IKEA) to form the outlines of a rice paddy

Filler and a pre-paddy.

And with some filler applied with a brush it starts to look interesting. Add a crater or two and we start to get an idea on what to expect.

Bases for the bamboo-groves and also for stands of barbed wire

Thomas got the bamboo-not-groves-yet while I got to finish the rice-paddies. Stay tuned for more on that soon.

Storing your minis the IKEA-way

This weekend I went to IKEA on a special wargamer mission. I bought two ALEX drawer units on wheels. They are 67 cm wide, 48 cm deep and 66cm high and have six drawers, three low and three higher, and are supplied with small wheels (that seems to be called castors). It’s 32 kg per package, so you probably need a car.

They were easy to assemble, and I installed the wheels on one, and placed the other on top, and secured it with jointing plates. After that I took a trip to the local arts-shop Panduro Hobby and bought 2mm rubber mats. The mats just needed some trimming, and they fit into the drawers. Having them will avoid having the miniatures sliding about in the drawers when I open or close them.

The result: at last a decent storage place for my minis. As they multiplied they got more and more crammed into whatever drawers, boxes and shelves I had.

Now I can have them all in one place, sorted so I can find them easily, and I will have space for all gaming paraphernalia and some terrain also.

The drawers are perfect as they are just the right height.

Highly recommended, and good for our trade balance too if you buy them J