Operational Terrain 8 – Monopoly Buildings to Fit 4 Inch Hexes

I’ve been doing some more musing on Operational level wargaming for my draft Deep Battle rule set. My Experiment on a 4 Inch Hex Grid forced me to get Tiny Hills to Fit the 4 Inch Hexes. Now I’m doing the same thing with buildings. In fact I’m using Monopoly buildings which are more like 3-5mm in equivalent figure scale, so much smaller than my normal 15mm.

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What went before

I mostly used my existing 15mm terrain for my Experiment on a 4 Inch Hex Grid. That meant a single 3″ x 3″ (75mm x 75mm) building sector in a 4 inch hex to represent a city. These ruins fit the hexes okay but with no room to spare. So I used more or less flat ruins to allow me to plonk troops on top. It works. It just looks terrible. Perhaps terrible is overstated. Lets go with unrepresentative.

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What Monopoly buildings to get

I wanted buildings that could comfortably fit inside a hex. So I got a mix of buildings from Standard Monopoly and Monopoly City. They were quite cheap from eBay. My collection includes:

• 32 Standard Monopoly Houses
• 12 Standard Monopoly Hotels with Chimney
• 12 Standard Monopoly Hotels with no Chimney
• 6 Monopoly City Power Stations
• 5 Monopoly City Schools
• 5 Monopoly City Industrial Buildings 2 Block
• 5 Monopoly City Industrial Buildings 1 Block

Standard Monopoly hotels and houses are fine for my purposes, and I could have stopped there, but I found the Monopoly City buildings a gold mine for this project. I got the power stations, industrial buildings and schools as they are big, impressive and look kind of industrial / Soviet.

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Basing the Monopoly buildings

I put the Monopoly buildings either on 40mm x 20mm small bases and on 40mm x 40mm large bases. A large base fits a Power Station and another building (e.g. 1 block industrial building) or two (e.g. houses). I think I’ll use these for major cities in the game. A small base fits either three houses, two hotels, a 2 block industrial building, or a single school. I’ll use these for minor cities in the game.

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Painting the Monopoly buildings

I painted them in my standard “brick ruin” style:

1. Undercoat in Black
2. Only for ground:
   1. Paint “Flat Earth” Dulux 80YR14140 Extra Deep W45
3. Only for brick and brick dust:
   1. Paint Dulux Monarch – this is quite a violent shade
   2. Dry brush Dulux Brick Red
   3. Dry brush Dulux Toasted Terracotta
4. Apply everywhere:
   1. Dry brush “Dark Sand” Dulux 23YY48254 Medium W45
   2. Dry brush “Pale Sand” Dulux 40YY75216 Light W45

That comes out a dusty brick kind of look.

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Conclusions and observations

I reckon they look good but will Monopoly buildings work for Deep Battle? Technically they will work, for sure. In fact players can use whatever they want for Deep Battle. The rules don’t care.

But the players will care and I’ve found wargamers to be remarkably opinionated. So will Monopoly buildings work for Deep Battle gamers? I think so.

On the plus side the Monopoly building sectors look much better than the previous 15mm ruins. They actually suggest cities rather than being a pile of rubble. Restricting myself to only one building sector in a hex allows room for troops, troops that can be beside the buildings rather than on top.

On the down side the Monopoly buildings are completely out of scale with my 15mm figures. That isn’t so outrageous given I’ve already gone for Tiny Hills, 1 cm wide roads, rivers and railway lines. So now the majority of the terrain is tiny (the trees are the only exception). I don’t want to collect small figures, so I’m going to continue my experiments with 15mm figures and tiny terrain. We’ll see if that ends up bugging me.