Collins builds the world of the walking dead

I would like to minimise the amount of painting that I have to do for these houses.

I think the easiest way to do that is to print off a load of wallpaper and glue it down, then weather it.

I went off to Etsy to see what there is out there. answer, lots that you can buy. but I’m being a cheapo and not wanting to pay for it. it didn’t take me long to fine this offering for dolls houses, not the same scale… but, print it smaller.

https://forum.greenleafdollhouses.com/gallery/album/1667-free-wallpaper-printies/

Now TWD:AOW is a game that encourages you to interact with the scenery. If you need to go somewhere, do something, climb on something, open something or even settle a cool idea of ‘what if’ you simply roll the black ‘badge dice’. On it there are 6 faces, 3 have Rick’s police badge (shield) and 3 are blank. This makes it the most boring die in the game with a 50:50 chance of either result. a sweet ass coin would be more fun.

However, that this means is that when you come up to a door, you have a 50% chance of it being locked or otherwise inconveniently stuck shut (or even open!). The rules for walkers mean they have to stop at doors and then in the next turn try to get through them which tends to mean running through doors and shutting them can be really good getaway technique from the shambling hoards… just don’t get yourself stuck in a room with no exit.

You can of course simply designate all doors as passible for humans, 50% blockers for walkers, line of sight blocking for shooting. which does correlate to the real world, after all, not many people have locks on their living room door.

The ‘Garage House’ has (stick with me here)… a garage. Given how ive chopped up the buildings I need to find a way to make them as playable as possible. ‘Big House’ has corridors and doors already as it was clearly a more expensive kit originally. ‘Garage House’ was a simple set dressing shell, not intended for internal play, as such, it needs upgrading.

Cue cardboard cutting montage (with music)

Now, when someone starts their game (or enters play if you’re a walker!) in the house they have two routes to get out, one from the front door going right, one into the garage going out left (obviously stopping off to pick up an M4 carbine as you go).

It could make a good objective room, the gun safe and the stacked up food shelves lend themselves to that quite well. there is also enough room in there still to have a swarm of walkers bite your face off.

A couple of years ago Mantic did a fab Black Friday deal on terrain crate.

I bought one of their ‘modern’ ones and I honestly regret not getting one of the fantasy and the other one I cannot remember the name of. When Mantic want to clear their warehouse you just need to go all in and worry about using for stuff later.

They pumped them out at £50 a time and they easily contained £200 worth of random terrain crate stuff quite literally thrown in a box and sent out the door.

I’ve gone through and used maybe 3% of it and stuffed the rooms in each of the houses to give it a nice theme.

finally the last roof is done, but can you spot the mistake I’ve made that will annoy me throughout the lifetime of the board.

I took the old one apart and used it as a stencil for the HDF. I couldn’t think of a better way to do it and for the most part it worked.

the new roof doesn’t sit flush on the building but I expect that for the most part they will be sitting on the sidelines to allow for play inside the buildings so I’m not worried. I compensated for it later with the shingles too.

The hardest part about keeping it removable is keeping it all in one piece when it comes off. the angles aren’t great and where I’ve cut it made it harder. I elected to reinforce a section with a roughly made triangular cross bar and what can only be described as an excessive amount of superglue. it worked though.

oh look… more shingles.

I overlaid across the edges of the HDF to create a ‘bigger’ and account for my lack of planning and measuring on the substructure.

The important thing is to keep building the shingles out way over the edge/top of where your cut line is. this way it gives the impression that the roof continues further on past the cut, rather than ending like a jigsaw. you get a lot of wastage on the shingle use but it does look better.

This is a really boring part. cutting all the shingles out is dull with a capital D, I still don’t think I have enough… more cutting from more cereal boxes needed (I’ve only cut up 1 box so far)

I have come up with a plan for the other rubbish cardboard roof tiles though. I will use the extra (scrap) HDF leftovers from the base board themselves. They’re only a mm thicker than the HDF for the buildings themselves and I will be able to cut them out myself rather than work around other holes (for example if I recycled the other building halves).

Looking at the roof on the far one I think I did a good job of it, adding the stripping over the peak of the roof was a good idea and makes it look really neat.

to create an idea of different heights of terrain I have elected to use 4mm thick cork matting. this stuff is good as it come with sticky back to it and isn’t hard to cut (it does however dull blades very quickly!)

simply layout what you want, mark and draw it. then stick down the cork board to suit.

when it comes to doing curbstones I simply cut up cereal box cardboard in 15mm by 5mm strips (a mistake, should have gone with 4mm) and glued it on with PVA.

the cardboard warps slightly as it absorbs the moisture but it levelled out eventually. when painted and dry brushed with the gutters filled with crap this will look fab.

finally I kept up the cutting of cardboard to make roof shingles.

one building is very robust being made of HDF the whole way round. another is naff as it is simply a cardboard roof that lost all rigidity when I cut away the walls I didn’t want so I really need to think about how to sort that faux paux

So i went to Penkridge wargaming jumble sale and someone was selling two MDF kits for cheap (i think £10). Being the good citizen i am i felt it was only right and proper to take ownership, add them to the pile o crap in the garage and then forget about it for a few years

yeah, so i went there… i gone done ruined two perfectly good kits.

Previously when ive made these tables/board (go back through this very project) i have used the entirety of the building. sometimes naratively for missions (the barn) sometimes because i liked it that way (petrol station).

This time you can imagine that in sub-urban Atlanta (or generic american town… Woodbury maybe?!) there are two families that live next door but absolutely hate each other. we’ve all been there, Karen and her arsewipe husband Kevin are just horrible, she’s got a screechy voice moaning about you parking on your drive instead of in the garage and he is always cutting the lawn at 7am on a sunday (heathen bastard), they’re both probably vegans too and aggressively moan about BBQs in the summer. So what do you do? Well the only reasonable thing to do in the zombie apocalypse, shoot them, feed them to the walkers and take all their stuff (except their food, there are limits).

now, the two gangs can face off starting in the houses or outside and make maximum use of the space rather than it being effectivly just blocking terrain. Less see how this works out as clearly the structural integrity has been compromised by the saw blade.