Noun:
Wargamer (Plural: Wargamers)
excessively concerned with minor details or rules: overscrupulous
See Also: frother, nerd, hyperventilation, deodorant.
While preparing terrain maps for the upcoming UK Kings of War Masters event I was drawn into a” Discussion” about the suitability of various board layouts for playing Kings of War. This seems to be a perennial issue which has no suitable answer as there are as many opinions on the correct table layout as there are wargamers. I should have remembered the old Adage that a Camel is merely an Horse designed by Committee, Don’t expect results quickly or pain free.
Therefore I have taken Claw to Keyboard to jot down my current thoughts on the matter, safe in the knowledge that so few people read my blog that anything I say or advocate amongst my musings remains as noticeable as a fart in a hurricane.
I have been taking notes over the past 7 years or so with the hope of coming up with a more streamlined set of terrain to allow the Players at tournaments that I run or that use my terrain collection to be confident that they are getting the fairest tabletop experience I can provide.
Originally I had all my wood bases made to the same size and cut from MDF with slots cut out for the tree bases, I still have all these bases but they are slowly being superseded by plain bases which allow me to place “Clumps” of based trees on top of the bases rather than having individually based trees.
This is a decision based purely on ease of play, the clumps of trees are easier to move off the bases than unplugging individual trees and in all honesty the woods look more aesthetically appealing on the table. The tree bases are all approximately the same size, I base it on the ability to fit an Infantry Horde into the wood (my hills are sized to a similar rule that a horde should be able to sit comfortably on top of the hill.
I recently undertook to have all my obstacles standardised too, I had my “Wood Guy” cut 100 6”x1” strips of 2mm MDF, 50 of these will have an obstacle (Fence, Wall, Hedge,snowdrift, pile of Heads etc) built onto it and the other 50 will be the sabot they sit on so that they can be removed for ease of play without losing track of where the obstacle is. Once this has been completed, I will have enough obstacles for 25 tables. There will be themed basing for the themed tables, just to complicate storage for myself – but sacrifices must be made in the name of progress.
I am also in the process of re-vamping my difficult terrain pieces, in the past to get them ready for ever expanding Tournaments I rushed through several rather dubious pieces of difficult terrain that I rather optimistically called “Fields” These are in the process of being recycled into something better, although that is a rather vague brief, even for me and I hope to be able to publish a Blog on what they have become. The Ponds and swamps I made have already seen a level of improvement and they are also earmarked for being taken to “the next level”. All in all there is going to be a fair amount of work put into the terrain before the next Clash of Kings event and the first thing that will be needed is extra storage in the form of Big plastic tubs. I have neither the space nor the presence of a beneficent Plastic Tub Donor to allow me to have separate storage for each tables worth of scenery and so a compromise must be reached. There is also a limit to how many of the tubs the Troll Wagon can carry and we no longer have the luxury of being a two vehicle family. So the “beautification” of the terrain must also take into consideration the durability of the terrain as it travels almost as much as the Trolls do in a Year.
The Blocking terrain is the next quandary that rears its head in the pursuit of “Boutique” Terrain sets. My current collection of 3D printed and scratchbuilt buildings is about as uniform as a box of broken biscuits. As I have come to realise leaving them unbased results in some interesting footprints on the table, nooks and crannies that can be utilised by unscrupulous (or canny – depends on your viewpoint) players to good advantage. Resulting in some frustrations during games. The simplest solution is to base all the blocking terrain onto regular shaped bases and count the base edge as the edge of the blocking terrain. An even better solution is to base all the blocking terrain on the same sized bases so that they take up a standard sized footprint on the table similar to the woods, hills and difficult, although this level of standardisation starts to lean towards the Abstract scenery seen at 40K tournaments and sold as “standard” sets to players, another extreme is the 2D neoprene terrain sets sold by Mat manufacturers and used by Warmachine/Hordes events which I am led to believe are attended by Soulless Robots that worship Statistics and decry the need for aesthetically appealing tables altogether <shudders> Hurrah for Terrain Crate !
The building of standard Terrain is possible, indeed the Kings of Liverpool use a set of standard Templates developed by Rob Phanouf of Countercharge Podcast fame, these look and play very well and if you are just starting out in building Tournament Terrain then I can highly recommend using them, just be wary of buying trees from Temu (sorry Ged I can’t resist) I think the Templates are available from the Countercharge Website although I may be wrong, feel free to correct me if I am!
Overall I am leaning towards the making of my entire scenery collection to a standard size using the “fits an Infantry Horde” benchmark. This will enable any map made to guide the placement of scenery to be made to scale. As I have seen people place terrain pieces until the table looks like the map or using a tape measure and the map to replicate the table exactly (all the time moaning if the pieces are not the exact same size as those on the map) and I am sure that soon Laser theodolites will start to make an appearance at Tournaments.
The Maps in question have existed since I started playing Kings of War, the oldest set being the Epic Dwarf maps, developed by Lars from the epic Dwarf Podcast. These are now hosted by Dash28 on their website. Other Tournament Organisers have developed their own map sets to use. I have started to develop my own set of Maps, some based on the 10 piece tables as per the Epic Dwarf maps and some based on more random numbers of terrain pieces to be trialled at events.
The layout of the tables seems to cause as much controversy amongst Kings of War Players as the size and shape of the terrain pieces, if not a little more. Too little open space upsets the Elf players, too much upsets the Orc players and any amount seems to confuse the Goblin players. Although as the UK apparently does not have a “Meta” to affect games (I have been reliably informed by the KoW Intelligentsia of this) then terrain should be Neutral.
A lot of T.O’s favour symmetrical maps although this sort of negates the point of rolling for table sides in some scenarios, I tend to prefer slight variance in sides of the table in order to stimulate a bit of tactical thought in my players, but not too much so as not to cause stress, breakdowns or negative Posts on Kings of War Fanatics. I do tend to run Tournaments as a semi-benign Dictatorship but ultimately the message is, If you don’t like it, don’t enter.
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