Making a Ruined City table

One of the benefits of keeping a blog is that it becomes a record of your gaming life. Now that I'm in the eighth year of blogging I can begin to go back to some of my earliest posts and see how far things have progressed (or not!). This was all brought home to me when I met up with Rob, someone who regularly comments on the posts here. We were talking about terrain and he mentioned how my early game reports were a reminder of how much my tables have come on over the years. He is absolutely right and I was reminded again of that recently when running The Road To Bremen campaign for a second time.

The final game is set in the ruins of Bremen itself and makes for a great setting. I really enjoyed putting the table together for this one and felt it was quite an improvement over my initial attempt more than six years ago.

That initial game was part of the third campaign that I had recorded for the blog and was just two years after I returned to miniature gaming. I'd been very busy making terrain during those two years and while the tables looked fine they lacked many of the small details that really make for a more immersive experience. 

Knowing what I do now, this was one table that I've always wanted to do again. When I put it together the first time I certainly had plenty of buildings, but that wasn't enough to quite capture the right look and feel. Looking at it now there's something a little sterile, even toy-like about its appearance.

Crossfire was the rule set that brought me back to miniature gaming and it’s a rule set that lends itself well to urban fighting. It needs a lot of terrain and for that I had scratch built quite a number of ruined buildings using foamcore. There's a blog post with more detail on how I made those here.

I had given some thought to rubble and how best to represent it. The one element I've stuck with has been modular pieces of rubble that can be positioned around the buildings. 

Admittedly they are slightly abstracted in form, but I’ve found them a simple solution to breaking the boundary between a building and the terrain it sits on. As you can see below they make for a quick but quite effective transformation.

Their versatility allows for variations.

While the bulk of my Second World War gaming these days is using Chain of Command it doesn't follow that those buildings are redundant. Far from it. Now they simply see action in more settings. I recently gave my Crossfire figures a complete refresh and did the same with many of the buildings. They still see use playing Crossfire, in fact we've had something of a revival of interest in the rules at the club and I've been running games like the one pictured below.

You can probably spot a few of the small details I've added to those buildings when compared with the picture from our original Bremen game below.

The foamcore buildings made up the bulk of structures for the ruins of Bremen and I recall at the time being very pleased with the table. That said, I wasn't quite as happy with the mat we used. It didn't really suit an urban setting and now I find it jarring to look at. The buildings don't sit comfortably and look very much like they were plonked down. 

If there's one thing I've learned over the last few years it's how well a good mat or base can tie all the different terrain elements together and create a more seamless piece of terrain. Take the image below. It's from an earlier game in our original Bremen campaign. The mat works well enough in a more rural setting and it makes for a perfectly acceptable table.

Now compare a few of the exact same terrain pieces arranged on the flocked mat in a similar rural setting. I think there is a notable difference.

While my original mat served me well, when I transitioned to a flocked mat the difference was obvious and immediate. Now the terrain pieces looked like they belong in their setting. 

I've been teaching a new player Chain of Command and we've been working our way through The Road to Bremen campaign. The good thing about this campaign is the high re-playability. The number of variables and options means it's extremely unlikely to ever play the same way twice. When it came time to playing on the last map which is set in Bremen itself I was eager to see if I could make a better job of the table at a second attempt.

As mentioned, I've carried out a little more work on the buildings. The main emphasis was on making sure they all work to the same colour palette. At the same time I wanted to add more texture and small piles of rubble. In all honesty you can never really have enough rubble but I've always wanted to strike a balance between form and function. 

If period photographs of Bremen in 1945 are anything to go by I'd need considerably more to capture the real look.

Ultimately the buildings have to be playable and the figures need to be able to work in the terrain, so there is always going to be an element of compromise.

The next thing to address was a suitable mat. I looked at those available commercially but in the end decided to make my own. The main reason was to ensure consistency with the building colour palette. For this mat I repurposed a piece of fleece fabric.

I had originally painted it for use as arid/desert terrain for games set in Afghanistan. I’ve since made a different one using canvas and caulk that I much prefer and so the fleece version had become redundant. 

It was a simple enough job to overpaint it using similar colours to my buildings.

The final missing element was scatter material, specifically more rubble. Looking at the original table from 2018 the one thing that strikes me is how neat it looks. While I have made detachable rubble pieces that help to break up the uniform shape of the building bases it wasn't enough. The simplest solution was to make up my own batch of rubble and scatter it once the building were in place.

I made this using cork floor tiles, the same way I've made the pieces of rubble that are set in place within the building models. In addition I painted up strips of broken balsa wood and threw in a generous amount of cat litter to make a custom rubble mix.

The loose rubble combines well with the modular rubble pieces and allows for endless variation.

Pulling all these elements together I felt I'd done a much better job of creating a table where the terrain appears more seamless. There's no doubt that the right mat combined with the scattered rubble are key components of the transformation. 

The scattered rubble does a very effective job breaking the sharp lines between the building bases and the mat. Could there be more rubble? Well, I think the answer is always going to be yes, there can never be enough. That said, I'm pleased with the way a relatively small amount can create an excellent impression of a rubble strewn landscape.

On another note, when we first played the campaign I didn't have a collection of Fallschirmjager and so we substituted my Waffen SS. This time I've had the added bonus of using my recently painted Fallschirmjager. 

All up it's been very satisfying to see all the various elements come together like this. It's certainly scratched my itch to do this table again and do it better.