Gorram’s Gotham

Sadly I’ve got to stop work on this project. After a few weeks of working away in the background on it, I’ve had to have a serious chat with myself. 

Firstly, I don’t have the storage space for a table this ambitious without some serious re-organisation of my flat. I had imagined some storage Tetris but it involved buying some new shelving units this side of Christmas. That brings me to the second reason for stopping.

I can’t afford to build the table the way I want right now. A major part of the table is going to be far more expensive than I had imagined and developments at work over the last month mean I’m a lot less sure how secure my job is. I need to batten down the financial hatches for the next few months while we wait on an outcome there.

So this is where I got up to. Three kits built and dreams put on a shelf. Maybe I’ll be able to come back to it for TerrainFest 2025.

After writing up some notes for myself and beginning to make plans for the table, I realised that I have a lot of questions about it that I don’t have answers to and there’s a lot of room for expensive mistakes. Rather than do my usual and rush in anyway, I decided to make a scale model.

The starting questions I want to answer:

1. What is the best size of table for what I have and want to achieve?
2. Do I have enough buildings?
3. How wide do I want the roads to be?
4. How about the pavements?

I have a six MDF kits from TT Combat that I’ve had for a while that will be perfect for this one. Getting the dimensions online for each kit was easy except for the largest of them. The Bank seem to be a discontinued kit so I had to open the kit and measure the base board size. The height is an estimation but it is mainly the footprints which matter for this exercise.

Once I had the dimensions, I just divided them all by 10 and started making some little paper templates. I used some thick paper so they were a little bit robust. It didn’t take more than 40 minutes to make them all.

I used foam board for the table sizes. First I made one scaled to 3ftx3ft and one for 2ft 4″x2ft 4″. The first is because that is the recommended size for Pulp Alley and the second because I already have an MDF board cut to that size that was for another project.

Then worked out the scale for a road that was 6″ wide.

After having a play around with different layouts, I decided the small table was really too small. 3ftx3ft is good however I looked up the cost of getting a new board.

Wow, nope.

I can’t afford that.

So back to the drawing board. I have three 2ftx4ft boards that I used to turn my dining table into a full size wargaming table. So maybe a 4ft table? Another piece of foam board cut out, and the playing continues. 4ft will need more buildings/objects to get proper coverage but I think that is preferable to the MDF.

Pavements I’ll come back to because it will tie into another element of the table but the scale model did help me make decisions about that too.

On the whole the scale model, while not necessary for every project, really helped me here. There’s quite a lot of extra skills I’ll need to pick up for the final table and so getting more of a handle on the basics before wasting money has felt good.

As kids, we were allowed to watch the Tim Burton Batman movies as often as we liked (age ratings just weren’t a think when the films were recorded off the telly) but it was with Batman The Animated Series that I truly fell in love with Batman. From the iconic opening credits to the overall tone of the show, the stylistic design to the plethora of bad guys, it really was perfection as a show. As an adult, I nabbed it on DVD as soon as I could and have since upgraded to the Blu-ray box set. The more I’ve read and heard about how it was made, the more in awe of it I’ve become.

Overall, it has been a pretty good couple of decades to be a Batfan. The comics have been through some fantastic story arcs and some less than stellar ones as usual. I recently got to rewatch the Nolan trilogy in the cinema again and honestly, you can shove everything Marvel have made up your batcave, *that’s* how to make comic book movies for adults. The Batman was pretty good, especially considering the shadow it sits in, and I’m looking forward to it’s sequel in the next couple of years. TV-wise, we’ve had Gotham (it was fine), and we’ve got Penguin coming soon (looks good). Then Amazon dropped the new animated show Batman: Caped Crusader.

Holy crap, it’s great. Spiritual successor to the Animated Series with Bruce Timm, JJ Abrams and Ed Brubaker producing, there’s so much to lover in it. I sat down to watch one episode and lost the rest of the day to watching all ten. Then I watched them over again within the week. Then I rewatched The Animated Series.

So here we are, the beginning of TerrainFest 2024 and with me utterly obsessed with Batman. No one locally is interested in the Batman the Miniatures Game (not that I blame them, Knight make it very hard to like them as a company) but I own a bunch of the minis and I’d really like to paint and play with them. Pulp Alley is in the lead right now for ruleset but let’s focus on this project for now.

Goal: To have a modular Gotham board with inspiration from the Animated Show.