Bloody Big Battles! on a tablecloth

 

A replay of the Bloody Big Battles! Vimeiro scenario gave me the opportunity to test the disposable tabelcloth approach to terrain. I thought I was buying paper tablecloths but they turned out to be plastic and semi-transparent. This actually turned out to be an advantage.

By placing the tablecloth over the printout of the scenario map, I was able to see exactly where the river, streams and roads were and to easily replicate their courses with masking tape. I didn't need to grid the tablecloth or draw on it, though I did choose to outline the hills with an indelible OHP pen to give them a distinct edge. This will be especially useful with multiple-level gradients.

Before applying the tape, I had stapled the tablecloth to the printout along one side to anchor it in place. On the night I just had to unfold the whole thing and everything was in place except the hills. 

Printout, felt hill and peeled-back roads layer.

I then peeled back the cloth, placed my pieces of felt onto the printout for the hills, and then put the tablecloth layer back with the roads etc neatly running over the top of everything. The terrain was completed with felt for the sea and village templates, and 3D buildings and bridges.

Thanks to the full-size printout, it was quick, accurate and easy both to produce the tablecloth layer in advance and to lay the hills on the night. Set-up time immediately before the game was reduced from 50 minutes to probably less than 20. 

This approach works well for me. The aesthetics could be better, but they could also be a lot worse! Of course, it increases the amount of pre-game preparation, but I should be able to cope with this if I limit new battles to one a month.

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.

My WoFun plans

WoFun Bavarian Foot

It will take time to sell off the armies I've decided to let go, and completing what remains of the lead mountain is even more uncertain, but as readers and fellow compulsive collectors will appreciate, I can't let that stand in the way of my accumulation of new WoFun armies! 

I've now got enough English Civil War standees for the Montgomery scenario in For King And Parliament, and can move on to collecting something else, at least for now. 

 

The areas that interest me most are the War of Spanish Succession, the '45 Rebellion and the Peninsular War, all in 18mm. Since posting my first impressions of WoFun I have settled on the 18mm ranges which I now think are the best balance between aesthetics and versatility. I have also been in contact with Vali Dumitru at WoFun and they are happy to supply half-sprues, removing the duplication problem with 18mm. I also asked about their plans for metal standees, but these aren't for now. WoFun are great communicators and couldn't be more helpful. 

 

Renewal of interest in the WoSS was originally inspired by Simon Miller's forthcoming Lust for Glory rules, but I can also use Maurice, and, at grand-tactical level, Bloody Big Battles, games I play already. 

 

The '45 has been a very long-standing interest. I've planned to do it several times, but never committed, partly due to the prospect of the mass painting of tartans! WoFun changes all that. 

 

I already play Blucher with unit cards at grand-tactical level, but Napoleonics at tactical level is another thing. There's a huge choice of rules for this, but I'm leaning towards General d'Armee 2 despite its complexity, and looking at the Peninsular War because it's a rich area and, for me, a fresh subject to study. The same armies could once again be used with Bloody Big Battles at grand tactical level. With 30mm wide bases, the 18mm WoFun standees are close enough to the 25mm BBB standard. 

 

The story doesn't end there as there are lots of other ranges that may become available such as the Monmouth Rebellion. The armies for that are on the small side but might work with FK&P.