Russian BUAs in early Winter

Scenery of the Day

My first shot at doing some scenery for 2mm gaming - I chose (of course), some nameless corner of Russia in early winter, with a few city areas.

The point of this board is to create something that is dirt cheap to make, looks reasonably realistic, and can pack into a small box for transport.
It is made up of 8" square tiles, each divided into 4" square 'sectors'.

As a 'sector' is the basic measuring unit of the game system, each 4" square sector representing 2km square in real life, by having these divisions marked on the board, you can play the game without a tape measure.

Anyway, on to the piccies : 

A 3' x 4' table, divided into 4" square sectors = 20km wide, 28km deep.

Completed tiles from the Russian side. A few larger city sectors connected together, and vast open plains before that. Need some river tiles yet ! The cities are dirt simple, but I reckon that they look OK from this vantage point.

Another shot from the Russian side. The BUA sectors certainly do the job of denoting where the cities are.

Z-scale Pines with light spray of snow on them - going to use these later to create wooded sectors.

Closer to ground level. Happy with the way the board is looking now. Simple paint job - base coat in a sandy brown with beach sand mixed in, and then when dry, hit it with a few coats of different colours with the airbrush. Simple and effective.

A little bit of sand to give texture, but not too much, else it may overwhelm the board in this scale. Most important is to keep it flat.

A half ruined city sector on a 4" x 4" tile. Apartment blocks are just that - little 1cm wooden cubes that I found at the art shop. Ruins are simply bits of foamcore cut up and airbrished with matte dark gray.  Light snow effect is airbrush with a thicker mixture to induce a little splatter.

Started to add in some windows to the state apartment blocks with a marker pen. Does the job OK.

More cheap and easy apartment blocks made up this worker's paradise.

They do look much better with windows after all ... fair bit of work with the marker pen, but worth the effort I think.

Note the craters here and there - the airbrush is brilliant for making soft smudges of colour on terrain boards, highly recommended tool.

Just ruins on this sector. One thing I found was that you need to resist the temptation to put too many bits on a terrain tile ... you still need to fit bases of fighting units on here, so just limit the actual buildings to the bare minimum, enough to denote that this sector contains BUAs.

Another view of the worker's paradise - state apartment block 587.   The best thing about these solid wooden apartment blocks is that the tiles can all be stacked neatly in a single box, and shipped for transport with no problems. They all sit flat, since all buildings are exactly the same height. I like.