As Aaron mentioned in his post, it appears that Stu has had a moment of madness and allowed a few of us access to his blog. I too am one of those gamers – cue maniacal laughter and distant lightning strike.
Until I met the ‘Garage Gamers’ and started playing with them I was in the happy little Games Workshop flock and played WHFB and WH40K to the exclusion of all other games. However now more and more of my attention is focused on my fledgling Flames of War armies. I have two of them, I’m an addict and no I don’t need councilling – honest!
Close proximity to the fantastic terrain produced by Stu has also prompted me to experiment myself and as a result I ended up with some henges which I’m pretty happy with. Although in the spirit of gamers ADD, I now have a new project:
I’m lucky enough to have a cousin who works in the cabinet making / shop fitting industry who has unlimited access to a CNC controlled milling machine. One box of beers and about a week later he has generously converted four 4′x8′ sheets of 18mm MDF into 128 hexagons with a length point to point of 1 foot.
I intend to turn these into a modular table suitable for both FOW and GW games. The first board is shown above. The picture doesn’t clearly show my layout but it’s there.
That hex table is already looking interesting. I see you’ve got roads down and have started planning hills. One thought: have you actually searched for any historical relief maps of WWII battlefields? They might provide some interesting inspiration.
Those hexes fit together a lot better than my hacked up MDF squares too…
Hmmm now there’s a thought.
I think I’ll go and see what is out there though the map I have sketched out has roads, hills and rivers complete with one bridge and one ford. I figure it should be interesting enough for both FoW and GW games though the roads will be FoW scale (I figure they can be dirt tracks in GW scale).
I need to sneak a stone henge in there too somewhere :-D
Heh I see Google has started throwing up adds for CNC mills because of your post.
$6000us was the price for one from CNCMasters.com which seems pretty cheap to me! Now if I can just convince my wife we can spare $10,000nz…
Heh, one of their reference sites is a New Zealand company too! Definitely one to add to the list for when those Lotto winnings come rolling in.
I made a bunch of these awhile back (I can cover a 4′x6′ area to a 2″ depth). I used extruded styrene (aka blue board) instead of wood.
The gaps between hexes on my were a little too large, but it looks like you’ve got that problem mostly solved.
I took some pictures of a game I ran with them awhile back, I’ve managed to lose the originals, but you can still see some of them in the “scenario” write up.
http://home.comcast.net/~chroniclesfromthepit/showdown_scenario.pdf
One thing to keep in mind, storage is “difficult” with these things. You may want to be on the lookout for suitable boxes.
Heh I know what you mean about storage. I currently have 4 large boxes of hexes taking up far too much of the house.