15mm Skirmish Box - New Board

Over the summer I've been working on constructing a new custom board for the Skirmish Box. The one you see on the other articles is very nice but I was wanting to add in the future extensions (such as wilderness sections) which wouldn't match up with the existing textures.

So I've used Dave Graffam's Cobbled Streets Kit to construct a new tile set and been stitching it together with GIMP (which is a learning curve in itself at times!). This kit has mud, gravel and grass layers that can be used for wilder areas as well and with a bit of practice the tiles can be combined.

After several town layout designs and lots of pixel gazing the final design is done. It should fit better with the number of buildings I'll be putting on the map. The previous one is lovely but seems to have slightly too many roads for the building population. The gravel section at the bottom to the map is to allow a link in with a future planned forest\wilderness map.

My test print of the board had a couple of print issues (the printer I used didn't seem to like the card surface much) but I've made it up anyway to get the design in use and tested before taking it further.

Additionally I've been working on the scenery sheets to maximize the print efficiency. I now have two buildings and some walls on one sheet of A4 card. The whole thing is another testament to the flexibility of Dave Graffam's photoshop file format option. I've settled on using two distinct texture layers for each house design and I think 6 houses with the the walls is just about right.

15mm Skirmish Box - another AAR

It's school holidays time and with some downtime I pulled out the Skirmish box for a quick game with Arabiansquire - one of the reasons the whole project started in fact. It's the first game of SoBH )or any wargame) he's played in quite a while - he's been seduced by the dark side of the local gaming club (Magic The Gathering!), so I gave him the humans and a reasonable middle ground.

15mm Skirmish Box - Board & Building Improvements

First of all thank you for all the suggestions on my board problems a few posts ago. All very helpful and appreciated.

For the record I tried flattening the vinyl based tiles under books. This did sort of work, but they still resorted to a curl after a period of non compression. I also experimented with gluing pine wood strips to the edges. Both White glue and hot glue bonds were too weak (white glue didn't stick at all) so I abandoned that idea.

After a bit of head scratching and beard stroking I decided to trial mounting the printed boards on mounting board, quite often used for displaying artwork or presentations. Made of cardboard, not to be confused with foam core.

I used 3M Photomount glue spray, stuck the printed sheets down, cut to the correct size and left under a couple of heavy books for a while. The result (so far) has been flat at the edges (see above)

This has left the boards pushing together nice and flat, as you can see in the picture above. I'm on Holiday for a few days soon, so I'll leave them just "in box" and see if they are still OK on my return (fingers crossed).

I have also been playing around with the folding house design. I've not been happy with the way the roofs have been sitting. They could be a bit fiddly, or sit squint and showing a gap in the wall (look back at previous photo's and you'll probably see evidence of this. So I changed from a tab to printing the full wall apex (see above).

The wall apex is still duplicated on the roof section, but the proper contour into the roof, and the texture overlap give a much better sitting and solid look (above).

Building scaling has also been changed. The models are designed for 30mm, so naturally the advice is print at 50% for 15mm. As you can see above the 50% is a bit small here, especially with the MDF bases I'm using.

Changing the scaling to 55% has produced a better result (to my eye anyway) and if I moved to basing on thinner washers I think the 55% would still be the way to go.

As an added note, these alterations have been made using Dave Graffam's alternative format of selling the Photoshop files of several of his designs. The two above are from the Small Shop and Rustic Cabins #2 sets. Photoshop is a bit pricey, but I use the free software GIMP which handles all the graphics and layers in the original format just fine. This has the added bonus of being able to apply the different layers as per the normal PDFs, but also make my extra cut sections, change the location of elements (window positions for example) and make new image files so that the scaled down versions can be entirely printed on a single sheet of card, saving time and money. I would personally recommend them over the pdfs where available (especially as they are the same price!)

15mm Board Test AAR

Despite the slightly curly edges, MacSver and I had a battle to test out the slightly smaller (22" x 22") board size.

I was the Orcs (MacSver) vs Undead (myself). Three treasures were place across the centre of the table. Whoever got the most home (or routed the other side) won.

15mm Skirmish Box - reworked board, work to do!

I've been reworking the board for the skirmish box.

Instead of 4 x square foot tiles I've changed to 6 tiles covering a 22 inch x 22 inch area. The reason for this is to avoid the complications and quality issues with having to apply a number of paper sheets to the same tile. This size lets me print one sheet of A4  to one tile, looking  to give a smoother and less gappy finish. Hopefully the loss of a couple of inches to the board dimensions will make little or not difference to the enjoyment of play.

 Also I have moved from printing on standard printer paper to 210gsm card (the same grade as the buildings). This gives a more durable playing surface I feel and applies to the adhesive tile better (no problems with the print flopping or wrinkling)

On the setback side though I've found that may tiles are curling up at the edges which isn't ideal at all.

This causes problems for my "smooth and less gappy" play surface brief. The problem I think come s from the way the tiles are manufactured. I'd assumed that they were flat, but looking again there is a slight bevel in them, so the the edges stay flush to the floor if the adhesive fails. Of course I'm using them upside-down, so this translates to the edges naturally curling upwards.

I'll have to figure out how to solve this or move to a different board material or setup.

Why all this R&D I hear you ask? Well, almost as if I was short of projects (which I'm not), I'm looking at producing a few of these skirmish boxes to see if there are any interested customers out there. If I can run a small batch and they go then we'll take it from there.

So far already it's been an interesting experience just considering the processes of upgrading something I bodged together for myself to a cost effective product that is practical to build and with an end product that I'd be happy paying hard cash for.

By the way, don't worry, I'm well aware of copyright\IP issues and have already made contact with relevant parties. No piracy here (unless its a theme for a future Pirate boxset!)

15mm Skirmish Box - Orcs

The third of my initial Skirmish Box warbands, The orcs.

Mounted Leader and 2 Cavalry

Remaining Command Group: Mage, Standard Bearer, Guard and Hero

Orc Warrior Horde

Whilst not all figures make it into the Skirmish Box pre-built warband the list is:

• Mounted Orc Leader; 92pts; Quality 3+, Combat 3; ;Leader,Long Move,Mounted;;
• Mounted Orc Boar Cavalry;47pts; Quality 4+, Combat 3; Long Move,Mounted;;
• Mounted Orc Boar Cavalry;47pts; Quality 4+, Combat 3; Long Move,Mounted;;
• Orc Warrior;23pts; Quality 4+, Combat 3
• Orc Warrior;23pts; Quality 4+, Combat 3
• Orc Warrior;23pts; Quality 4+, Combat 3
• Orc Warrior;23pts; Quality 4+, Combat 3
• Orc Warrior;23pts; Quality 4+, Combat 3

301 Pts

15mm Skirmish Box - Human Barbrians

Second of the initial 3 warbands is the Human Barbarian Force.

The figures on display have again just been primed white and ink washed (Vallejo Sepia this time) for a bit o quick colour on the table and help with the details. Not all these are in my pre-generated warband, they are the pack contents from 15mm.co.uk I used.

Command

Ranged Section - an archer and 2 slingers

Spearmen

Warriors

Taking these shots has been really helpful for me to see what detail these figures actually have, as well as where I've missed a bit of tidying up pre-paint.

15mm Skirmish Box - The Undead

Thought I'd do some small profiles of the "pre-generated" warbands I've done for my 15mm Skirmish Box project. First of all the Undead.

All the models are from 15mm.co.uk. They have a quite a large and varied 15mm fantasy range to choose from. Mostly geared towards large army battles, but they also sell small packs containing the diferent sculpts to encourage 15mm skirmish gaming. Unfortunately their online store photos are a bit indistinct and make the details difficult to see, so I've taken some close up pictures of my prep'ed models. Not all make it into the warband list, by the way.

(left to right) Mounted Leader, Cavalry and skeletal horse.

Human Skeleton Warriors

Undead Horde

Song Of Blades and Heroes stats:

• 1 x Undead Leader (88pts): Quality 3+, Combat 2: Leader, Long Move, Mounted, Undead
• 1 x Undead Cavalry (58pts): Quality 3+, Combat 2: Long Move, Mounted, Undead
• 3 x Skeleton Human (26pts): Quality 3+, Combat 2: Undead
• 3 x Walking Dead (18pts): Quality 5+, Combat 4: Slow, Undead
  
• Total: 304 pts

All these profiles are straight from the Core "Songs of..." ruleset.

15mm Skirmish Box Playtest

Last weekend saw the inaugural play test of the "Songs of..." 15mm Skirmish box (and in fact the first 15mm game I'd ever played!). It was a 3-way straight battle between MacSver, Ironman John and myself.

15mm Skirmish Box - Set Up Video

You asked for it (well Tristan did!) and here it is: a quick video of the terrain out the box. Looking at it, the sound is a bit quiet, so remember to turn down the volume after viewing if you don't want your neighbours to know when you get new emails!!

15mm Skirmish Box - WIP 2

With a bit of a delay due to having a weeks training, the terrain part of the (prototype) Skirmish box is complete. 4 collapsible buildings and a series of walls. Put out like above there does seem to be alot of space, but I'll do a few test plays before building another couple.

For an example of scale I've put in a couple of my newly arrived 15mm Barbarians from 15mm.co.uk (so new they haven't even been glued to their bases yet!). I've left the walls unglued. I did glue 2 lengths together, but the unglued option seems to be more flexible.

The buildings flat fold with a bit of minor kit-bashing. The end apex is cut from the building wall and attached onto the roof with an inward fold. This allows the roof to be folded "shut".

The building walls are just glued together with some base tabs and an internal card floor piece is dropped in (unglued) when they are needed to keep them in a square shape. After a bit of experimentation I've also added a couple of card flaps to sit behind the roof\wall apexes to help keep the roof in place.

With the terrain done I can now look at the warbands that have just dropped through the door...

15mm Skirmish Box - WIP

A quicky here. It's funny how some projects just suddenly pop into your head from nowhere. This one came from a discussion on gift boxes!

So the idea is to have a box which contains enough stuff to quickly open the box and get playing with minimum time. It's got to play on the kitchen table and be completely self contained whilst still looking good.

After a bit of thought, 15mm seemed to be scale to run with. Both for space and price. At 15mm 2' x 2' is the ideal table space which can easily fit on a table.

So here is a quick progress shot. I'm using four 1 foot x 1 foot self adhesive vinyl floor tiles as a board. The texture is a scaled down Rake Corner Map from Dave Graffam. The building is also Dave Graffam's, but from his old free range (that makes up most of my 28mm fantasy town). There has been a bit of minor kit-bashing to make it fold flat for storage in the box (at the moment a 12" Pizza box for the tile size).

Warbands have been sourced from 15mm.co.uk. I have figures to form Barbarian, Undead and Orc warbands ordered.

Well more as it's done...