I got my Hotz Mat with a 4″ hex grid so I thought I’d try out my Operational terrain so far. This is part of my experimentation to inform the set of rules I’m thinking about called Deep Battle.
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Category: Making Stuff
I’m really keen on Operational Level Wargames at the moment and have a mind to write a set of rules called Deep Battle. I thought a good starting point would be with the table top. Get a table that looks like the kind of game I want to play, and use that to inform the rules. So I’m going to continue experimenting with Operational Terrain. One of the ideas from my Experiment with River Templates for 4 Inch Hexes was to get a company to produce my river templates in MDF. Warbases kindly agreed to do this for me. They 
Brett Simpson kindly sent me some “Fairy Door Grass Mats”. I’d asked about the grass tufts in his jungle photos and wanted to know the source. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, Fairy Door Grass Mats are only available in Australia. So Brett sent me some. Despite the mushrooms and bugs, these mats are a useful source of jungle foliage. Perfect for the Portuguese Colonial War. 
I’m always on the hunt for better wargaming kit. So a couple of years ago I experimented using Sisal Florist Mesh Wrap for terrain templates. 
I have been collecting, making, and painting Ruins for quite some time. All for my long term Stalingrad project. So I thought I’d get all my ruined buildings, rubble piles, and shell holes out and see if I had enough. What do you reckon … do I have enough ruins? 
I thought I’d share some of the ideas of Willem from SixMil Builders on terrain for hex mats/tables. In particular his interlocking MDF roads. He also makes 6mm buildings to match. 
Quite a lot of the Operational Level Wargames I looked at recently use a hex grid. And 4 inch hexes seem about the right size for the table top – at least to me – so I have been wondering what to do about terrain. My normal terrain will sit on hexes fine. But rivers are different. That realisation lead to experimenting with templates for generating river features to sit on top of a hex mat. 
I ran out of cardboard terrain templates in my recent game of Crossfire so I made some more and took the opportunity to take some photos. It is a pretty simple process. 
Brett Simpson has been busy building up terrain and troops for North Africa using Crossfire. He is also experimenting with my ideas on Crossfire in the Western Desert. Brett has been sharing photos with me as he went along so I thought I’d share them more widely. 
I was filing old papers tonight when I found a few photos of a very early game of Crossfire. Real photos, you know, the ones on photographic paper, from a shop. It took a while but I figure the game was Ponyri Station. I thought I’d share because, aside from the fact these are the only photos I have of a game of my favourite scenario from Hit the Dirt, they also show how I started out in Crossfire – using anything I had. 
Brett Simpson sent me a photo of a tree he’d made. I thought it was fantastic and asked Brett for some step by step instructions. So he sent me his approach to crafting trees using wire, steel wool, and flock. 
After many years of sitting in the kitchen of our flat to paint, I now have a room all to myself. It isn’t big enough to wargame in, but it is big enough to store my kit and to paint in. My work colleagues, who get glimpses of it on Skype, call it the “Man Cave”. 
Ross Kearns has launched a kick starter for a Tabletop Hex Terrain Toolkit. I asked Ross to write a guest article about it. All words and images are Ross’s. 
Around 2000 Barrie Lovell published, on the Grunt! website, a tip for adding undergrowth to Crossfire / Incoming! bases. Barrie dyes sisal string and uses this as vegetation. Since Grunt! has disappeared I thought I’d republish the article here. Barrie had in mind Vietnam / Incoming! and World War 2 / Crossfire. But this is a good technique for the Portuguese Colonial War / Fogo Cruzado. 
I’ve been experimenting with How to Track Fire Missions (FM) in Crossfire for years. In my latest experiment I’ve made some custom FM markers. |
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