adventures in terrain building part 5 and this and that

Yesterday was my brother's birthday, I think I made it special for him, took him to the mall, took him to Mitsuwa, which is a Japanese grocery store/food court, cooked up Corned Beef and Cabbage, which is something I had never done before, it turned out quite well for a first try.  But when I took the kids outside, I was under dressed, should have put on a coat, it was only fifty something degrees out, and not eighty something, and so have come down with an awful cold, first time in years.  My throat is sore, my head is swimming, not happy about that.

No good deed goes unpunished, as the saying goes.

Nevertheless, I did get some work in on the tree stands.

Foam board is not the easiest thing to cut.  The paper the foam is sandwiched in between, doesn't quite cut the same way the foam does, and sometimes, even with a nice, sharp knife, the foam snags.  So I wound up re cutting the stands, and re cutting them.  Then afterwards, I had found The Unofficial Guide To DBA, which is a very good thing to have, to decipher these rules, I discovered that the dimensions of my tree stands were not correct, according to the rules.

That set me aback... for a couple of days.

Finally, I decided I couldn't afford to care.  I'll be playing my miniature battles by myself anyway, and I don't care.  So I decided the stands won't be scrapped and new ones re cut to fit a rectangle the length of and width of does not exceed nine base widths or some such anyway.

Finally, I set about gluing the home made trees, made the hard way, to their stands.  Four stands.  I used a pointed stick to punch holes into the foam core, pushed the trunks into the holes, then put in the super glue around the bases of the trunks where they join the foam board to keep them in place.  Here are how they look.

All in all they don't look too bad.  Need to flock them.  Not sure if I'm going to add undergrowth or fallen trunks though.  I want to be able to place individual figures in between the trees like light infantry, scouts/bidowers in there like in Lion Rampant, or bunches of Warband in like in DBA.  Or a whole whack of Polish knights emerging from the tree line like in the epic film Krzyzacy to take on the Teutonic Order at Grunwald.

So, to update, I will need to flock these, then build a road, a river, two gentle hills, two rough hills, and three plowed fields, and maybe a hamlet... a strategic hamlet with concertina wire, some huts, maybe emplacements for a battery of 105 howitzers and a helicopter pad.  Just kidding.