RECRUITS Bolt Action Board

Here I go again building out another gaming board.  A few ask why I keep building these.  Well besides the time it takes which is Therapy to me it actually is much cheaper in the long run for me.  I just hang these up on a closet wall and the next time I play it takes only minutes to setup for a battle.

Here is the usual framing.  I took two 2 x 4 foot sections, already cut from the local Home Depot.  This time I built up a 3 inch rail on three sides of each board and a two inch rail where I would join the boards together.  I will talk about that later.

After Power Grabbing the Foam sections and elevations to the board I cover with the usual Plaster Cloth.  Just shoot water and smooth it out.  I always have my vehicles, buildings, troops around for scale and to give me more ideas as to what I am trying to create.

Here is a look at the boards together.  I also added the Wooden and Pegs and holes at this point.  The concept is to be able to remove the trees, buildings, etc and place one board on the other using the pegs.   I will add the locks, handles and two wheels at the very end of the build.

I was going for more elevation(s) to make Line of Sight a little more challenging.  Bolt Action and any Skirmish Game system really takes that LOS seriously.  

Again, my new best friend is Tile Grout (Earth Color) to cover the plaster.

It goes on easy with a trowel and wear gloves!  It already provides a nice texture to it.  

Had this idea to buy some walls and then said, "wait a minute!, what about all this foam board you have laying around.  So I cut 3/4 quarter inch tall strips to create my walled fields.  You can also see the roads I put in.  That is simple Spackling putty and using some tape for the edges just smeared it on to get the paths I wanted. 

Roads got a Brown base and a lighter highlight at the end. 

Yes I wanted to get a more Spanish or Italian looking board and the Pine Trees may not be correct but I go a good deal on them at Caboose Train Store.  

The Buildings I believe are Miniature Building Authority.  Here again I am getting ideas and making sure the infantry have a good feel regarding the height of the walls.  

I got some Coco Matt from Tony Fryer, thanks Tony, using that stuff really makes a terrain board pop!

On the walls I smeared some Liquidtex Cereamic stucco available at the local craft store.  When that dried the walls got a black base and two shades of gray to give them a stone like texture.  

And then had this idea to hot glue some lichen to give it a semi bocage, hedge, vine growth kind of thing on the walls.  

Starting to shape up!  Note that the forest will be "unplugged" and bagged when in transport along with the buildings.  

This walled area will get full foliage on the walls while the other a little lighter.

The Building on the hill in the foreground was scratch built by Mr. Tony Fryer.  The interior even has wall paper and wood floors.  On this hill we are going to put the Ruined Farm that comes in the Bolt Action Normandie Starter Box.  

There is that house to the right that we will probably will not use.  Not about that dried up stream.  I saw some pictures when looking up Italy and Spain and one of those pictures gave me this idea of a dried up stream.  So I painted in some "puddles," dropped some rock and some wood pieces in there, then poured the liquid water and let it dry over night.  I also added some twigs from the backyard to make a makeshift foot bridge.  We will be creating a small forest path from this point to the road in the forest. 

A word to the wise, make sure you do your streams either before or after flocking.  Just make sure it is COMPLETELY dry.  I learned that lesson long ago.  It can make a mess when the stream is wet and you decide to start blowing off the excess flock.  Oh yeah, I did that in my early days...

Looking through the Forest from the road.  I was worried about having long open LOS.  Looking here if a tank got to that point in front of that wall it would be able to catch a vehicle coming around this bend.  Any further behind that wall the terrain drops a level or two which will make it difficult to setup that far away.  

And here is my Jedi painting, terrain, and everything hobby Master, Mr. Doug Wildfong.  He has been doing this for a long, long time and he knows his stuff.  He came over to my house with various flocking material and ideas to bring the terrain board to life!  

Doug will be running the Bolt Action games with me at Recruits.  We are also driving from Denver together, both our first time to this convention.  

As the work continues I mark the tree holes with screws so that we can flock away.  Probably a good idea to use the screws when in transport making it easier to insert the forest.

So here we are close to the final phases.  That stray field up left on that hill is where our ruins will be going.  And we are looking maybe to add some hedges or more trees on some open areas.  We should wrap this up in a couple of days.  Also note that I will be running some Napoleonic Skirmish in 28mm on the same board.  We plan to move a few things around and presto, some mano y mano skirmish combat.  

 I will update the blog showing the board hardware, wheels, handles, locks, etc.  Please stay tuned, join this blog to get the next updates over the next couple of days.