Abandoned Desert Village

Over the years I’ve bought terrain in various scales that looked great to start with but once on the table there was an annoying scale discrepancy or placing figures in/on the terrain didn’t work very well.  I’ve had several pieces that were just too small to get a unit of figures in without piling the figures up tight together, I never liked the look of it.

The main game for this terrain will be Bolt Action, so to start, I decided to measure up just how much floor space a full section of infantry takes up when set out according to the ‘one inch rule’, ie; figures can be spread out up to one inch apart in the same unit to minimise damage from area effect HE hits.  A unit spread out like this needs quite a bit of floor space; in two ranks 9” x 3” = 27 square inches or in open skirmish order 6” x 6” = 36 square inches.   This is going to make for some large buildings, so I will have to accept a bit of ‘bunching up’ of figures but I still want them to look like a deployed unit and not a gang of sardines all crammed in together.

After working out how much floor space, I sketched out a few floor plans on some bits of card to see how the unit would fit and tried it with the figures.

Then I sketched out some wall plans based on the measurements from the floor plans. I decided to make the walls 50mm high before I start adding damage from the collapsing/erosion.  To work out the dimensions for doors and windows I measured up a few figures; the average across the shoulders was 10mm so I made the doors 15mm wide. Average height without the base was 30mm so I made the doors 32mm high. For the windows I measured a kneeling figure aiming and a standing figure aiming so I will be able to place figures with weapons pointing out of the windows, the lower ledge is 15mm from the floor and the top edge 30mm. I made the windows 10 or 12 mm wide randomly.

Before I get too deep into cutting and gluing I decided to try making a prototype test piece to try out the materials and techniques I want to use.  This is how that went