Terrain for Bloody Big Battles!

Vimeiro from Matt Bradley's draft scenario in the Groups.io B3 group.
Armies are 18mm WoFun Peninsular War Napoleonics.

It's about ten years since I last played Chris Pringle's Bloody Big Battles! which is a shame. So returning to it is a voyage of rediscovery. Happily I was able to recruit a crack team of players to get to grips with the navigation. The rules are not long or complicated but my comrades collectively described them as "very nuanced". BBB/B3 is excellent fun as a multiplayer game, and I am grateful that having provided and set the game up, Ian, Kim, Simon and Bob took the lead.

My main part was providing the scenery and that's what I'm going to write about first. Recreating the topography in the scenario maps is foundational to B3. When playing the game the first time round, I used Hexon II to recreate the complex and 'continuous' terrain. This rendered the maps accurately and was quite magnificent once you got used to the aesthetic of hexification. 

But the battles using Hexon were played at home with unlimited set-up time, and it is totally unrealistic for me to transport and construct terrain of that sort for a club night game. After some initial attempts to revisit my original options a scan of the B3 group on Groups.io brought me to a video by Konstantinos Travlos.

Konstantinos (author of Bloody Big Balkan Battles!) simply puts down variously-sized felt shapes to build up the hilly areas. This approach also allows great accuracy. Combined with a gridded mat, I thought it would be very straightforward to recreate any scenario map, and everything is reusable. But in the heat of the moment it actually took the best part of an hour to set up, and that is just too long to keep players waiting. The felt hills worked well enough but the felt roads and rivers were too flimsy and easy to displace.

My next plan is to draw each map onto a disposable tablecloth so most of the work can be prepared in advance and the battlefield can simply be unrolled on the night. This doesn't require or preclude the addition of 3D elements - BUAs and woods on top and a token indication of elevations underneath. Feature edges like contour lines will be drawn and precisely demarcated so there won't be any ambiguity. Roads and waterways will be indicated with masking tape. These are all solutions I've seen other users apply.

As an interim measure, if I don't get time to prepare a cloth, I will simply use a paper printout of the map. I discovered that my veteran version of CorelDraw is nonetheless capable of printing an image to tiles, so it's possible to blow the maps up to 4' x 6' and then print them as a set of A3 pages which can be taped together. I know from previous experience that paper is unappealing and has its problems, but it's a quick and easy solution.