Muwuhaha, and Now I Have a Blog: Trees too!

  

Taking my cue I enter from stage left to talk about my weekend. I had a good one, in fact given how ill I've been over the last three months, after being diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, it was a very good weekend indeed. What made it good was that I got to do somethings I wanted, have a friend come around and play a game, stay for a meal and generally managed to enjoy shooting the breeze. 

So where to start?

Well I'm a pretty avid model maker, and spend lots of my spare time building stuff that interests me. I'm also a wargamer, though truth be told I don't play games as often as I would like, but do probably play as often as I can, all things considered. What I was making on Saturday morning was a bunch of trees for for playing miniature games with, namely BattleTech, Ogre and the like, as I'm a big SF fan too.

 So I'll start with the trees. 

In the picture at the top are the trees I've mounted on some metal bases to make them stand up and more resistant to falling over. I've also added extra ground foam glued on to bulk them out a bit. In addition, I've added some Woodland Scenics foliage netting to to some of them, which creates a nice airy volume.

These are not what I would call "hero" trees, but I hope that they will look better than the average wargaming tree. One of my bugbears is that most wargame terrain and trees, bar the very best top quality presentation games, are very much tokens that nod to the concept of the reality that underlies the game. I'm striving to raise the standard, whilst keeping the terrain modular and generic.

Anyway, as I said, my friend Clive came around in the afternoon and he indulged me by choosing to play BattleTech with me. Clive is a good sort like that. We set up a game on a hex map, but used some miniatures I have, and we only had to use one substitute mech, so that was good. Got through about three turns in about an hour and a half, which again is not bad for a three-on-three mech game.

Also, I was having to talk Clive through the rules, and he was struggling with tactics, as he generally plays more strategic and operational level games. He said he enjoyed playing, but I'm not convinced he is a convert to the BattleTech cause.

Afterwards we ate and chilled out chatting about other stuff, including the Live Action Role Playing game that we are both in called Contact!. This generates a certain amount of discussion, because the plot is quite convoluted, and the game has been running a number of years with player attrition due to real life issues raising their ugly head.

So, that's all until next time.