The Big Finish:

Well for very minimal outlay, and frankly not a ton of effort, we have produced a nifty portable game box. And while it won’t appease the megolomania most gamers carry around, it looks a darn site nicer than a lot of boardgames.

The only real finishing touch the box needs is flock. After staring at the blank “putting green” battlefield, i decide to go one more step. I raid the bin of basing materials, and gather up all the leftovers. Bags and tins of flock and scatter that are almost empty, that I no longer use, etc. I throw them all in a big gallon-size zip-loc bag. Then I grab my thinned white glue (I always keep a jar handy) and a 2” brush (a normal paint your house brush, nothing fancy), and paint the base of the box with it. Then I cover the glue in handfuls of my flock mix. When I think I have good coverage, I step out on the balcony. I close up the box and shake, to get as even a coat as I can.

This proves to be a mistake. The glue was a little too thin totake this handling and I created some bare patches as well as some mounds. I try to paint in the bald spots and re-flock but it clums up and makes little mounds. So I give up on that. Instead I use my regular basing grit to make sandy/rocky patches. This goes much better. Now my BattleBox looks like this:

Not bad. So now I have to do the hills. I decide to make some plain green topped, others will have little fields or rocky patches to break up the green. A little experimentation reveals an important tip. Line the edge with undiluted white glue and create a “lip” of flock and scatter. When you brush on the thinned glue, get a little on this lip to prevent it from leaving a blank edge. After adding flock and grass and some grit, the hills now look like this:

The same technique is applied to the river banks so they will match the rest of the terrain. I’ll want to add more terrain over time - buildings, bridges, roads and so on, but for now I have a very portable game that, if I convert from inches to centimeters, gives me a table equivalent slightly more than 4’ x 6’ measuring in at 88 x 50”

Here is a glamor shot of a battlefield, along with the rest of the kit. Obviously this is from before I flocked my river pieces. And Ii need to make some short straight river pieces (or cut some of these down). But all this needs is a bridge or ferry to make a nice little market town.

And a few close ups:

There are two flexible rulers that have both Imperial and Metric rules. A small dice box that contains a variety of dice, plus some green beads (useful as target points, hit markers etc) and some red disks (used as rout markers, objective or entry points, etc). And finally those two gray trays are “pluck foam” army transports that allow me one tray per side. Obviously they are unplucked as yet.

The dice box:

Ready for our trip:

Now all that is left to do is write the post mortem...

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