(Deutsche Version) Since I have been playing tabletops for quite a while now, I want to post an introduction today because I think that tabletops are the best and most intresting kind of parlour games. Tabletops do exist in many different worlds, I will focus on the fantasy setting. Technologically, a fantasy setting is like in the Middle Ages when gunpowder was just developed. There are many different races like dwarves, elves, orcs, goblins, dragons and many more. Additionally, magic exists as for example a wizard being capable of shooting fire balls.
A tabletop consists of figures which are placed on a table or gaming plate. Well-known producers of tabletop miniatures are for example Kings of War von Mantic Games, Warhammer von Games Workshop, Dwarf Wars von West Wind Productions or Hail Caesar von Warlord Games. Personally, I use the miniatures from Mantic Games because they are quite cheap and have sime interesting units like archangels or brock riders which are not sold by other manufacturers.
The basic principle of a tabletop is two armies (or more) fight against each other, similar to the video games of the series Total War.
Painting and constructing
If you want to start with a tabletop, you have to have an army. Usually there are starter sets, i.e. from Mantic Games, consisting of one or two armies, dice and a rule book. This set then delivers single plastic pieces which have to be painted and constructed. This already offers one point of conflict: Construct first or paint first? Personally, I think that painting first is better, if the figures are already constructed, you cannot paint all places as good as prior to constructing. If you pain first, I would suggest to painting above all places with glue again after construction to have a better look. Another important argument for painting first is that otherwise you can already play with the constructed figures. Painting will be shifted to later and maybe never done, this is responsible for whole armies being unpainted what looks miserably. If you paint first, you can only play with the figures when everything is done, so you have the motivation to paint them.
For construction, I use the well known Revell Contacta glue, you can purchase this cheaply in nearly every toy store. I also use colours from Revell, at first I used the Email colours, they are really strong (except for white) but are rather thick and not easy to handle because they cannot be thinned with water. I later switched to the Revell Aqua colours, they are really easy to handle and can be thinned with water so you can also use different painting techniques like washing by thinning the paint with lots of water. Additionally, the Aqua colours should dry faster (4 hours vs. 1 hour).
If the army is constructed, you can start to play. Therefore you need another player with an army or you simply purchase two armies and let them fight against each other. You can use nearly everything as a gaming field, starting at the carpet or a table to a green felt mat or special gaming mats and even modular terrain as I already described it in this blog. For the beginning, a table is sufficient with some objects like a piece of paper as a swamp, a book as a hill, the only limitation here is your mind.
Rules
I now want to address the rules of these games, especially the rules for kings of war which you can download here on the bottom of the page. Basically, the game is round based, one player after the other. Every player has three parts during his turn.
Movement
At first, movements are executed, every unit has a movement value in inches which describes how far a unit may move. There are special rules for attacking enemies which are explained in the rule books.
Shooting phase
After the movement, ranged attacks are executed, all units which are not in melee may shoot. There are usual ranged infantry units but also artillery and magic attacks, all of them are handled in this round. Let's for example face dwarven crossbowmen (Ironwatch) from Kings of War. They have a ranged ability (Ra) of 5+ and 10 attacks. This means that you have to throw 10 dice and every result of 5 or higher counts as one hit. Next, the damage is calculated. Therefore, every die that hit the enemy is thrown again. If the dwarves for example shoot on orc warriors (Greatax) which have a defense value (De) of 4+, you have to throw now 4 or higher to inflict a point of damage. Afterwards a nerve test is performed, this will be explained below.
Melee phase
After the ranged phase, the melee phase starts. All melees are initiated in the movement phase by bringing your units in contact with the enemy. The melee phase is similar to the shooting phase, except for that the melee value instead of the ranged value is used. Here, also hits and then damage is calculated and afterwards a nerve test has to be performed.
Nerve test
After the shooting and melee phase, a nerve test has to be executed. The nerve test determines whether a unit can still fight or is damaged too heavily, the moral has broken down or the unit has been wiped out completely. Therefore, two dice are thrown and all the damage from the unit has to be added. Every unit has a nerve value, consisting of two numbers. If the sum out of dice and damage is as big as the first number, the unit has lost its moral, can only do some basic movements like going backwards or turn and cannot shoot in the next round. A round later, this effect is gone again. If the sum is as high as the second number, this means that the unit is wiped out. Either all soldiers are dead or they fled and will never return again - this unit will not fight again and has to be removed from the battlefield.
These are the main principles for playing a tabletop. Of course I just showed some simple aspects of tabletops, if you really want to play a tabletop, you should look into the rule book. The different games have different rule sets, personally, I prefer the rules from Kings of War because they are quite simple and still allow a lot of tactical depth, so the game does not only consist of checking special rules and reading in the rule book all the time.
There are other settings where you can find tabletops like e.g. science fiction tabletops which have quite similar rules, and also historical variants, completely without magic. There also exist tabletops in other scales like a space ship fight or a sea fight with ships. I really like Kings of War from Mantic Games best, the scale, 28 mm, is a good compromise between size of units and the size of the details. It also is the most common scale for tabletop miniatures. I hope that I was able to arouse interest for tabletops so more people can discover this amazingly interesting sort of parlour games.
Saturday 15 November 2014
Sunday 2 November 2014
Tabletop terrain - water
(Deutsche Version) The basics of creating your own terrain are quite simple. Construct your model, paint it and add grass or some decorative stuff. Of course you can spend an infinite amount of time for doing this but the basic principle is easy. What I did not try until now was water. The easiest version of water is a simple blue area with a shiny surface. Usually, this does not look that good.
There are several commercial solutions to create nice water which I did not try at all. I used silicone instead, which you can get cheaply, for example at Obi (I used this one from an Obi in Germany). The result looks quite good:
When working with the silicone, you should keep in mind that it dries very fast and sticks to your fingers. Creating a wavy surface is easily achieved, if you want to have a flat surface, this is much harder. Additionally, you should keep in mind that the silicone is not perfectly transparent. Therefore, I would suggest to only use the silicone for a thin layer or the waves effect. If the terrain piece shall also consist of grass, I would highly recommend to applying this before the silicone due to the fact that the small grass pieces stick horribly to the silicone and nearly cannot be removed any more. If you want to create deep water, you can see a test object from me in the next two pictures:
The test object is 1 cm deep. The surface is much flatter but still not a perfect flat surface as you would want to have for a lake. For larger volumes, keep in mind that the silicone does not stick to itself after it has started to dry, this creates white areas which do not look good, as you can see in the pictures.
Compared to the price of other commercial products, the silicone is much cheaper and still looks quite nice.
There are several commercial solutions to create nice water which I did not try at all. I used silicone instead, which you can get cheaply, for example at Obi (I used this one from an Obi in Germany). The result looks quite good:
Compared to the price of other commercial products, the silicone is much cheaper and still looks quite nice.
Siege equipment part I: Siege ladder
(Deutsche Version) Since I explained how to create parts for a castle, I now have to focus on the attackers. As a first step, I want to start with the most easy part, namely the siege ladder.
To create a siege ladder, you need a piece of wood which has a cross-section area of 3x3 mm, I used balsa wood. For a ladder, you need 72 cm. The balsa wood is cut into two pieces of 18 cm length and 9 short pieces of 4 cm. Now, you have to mark the large pieces at the positions 1,3,5,... cm and glue the short parts on them. This completes the siege ladder, you can add some brown color (I would propose watercolour because you still can see the wood structure from below).
Tabletop terrain - hills
(Deutsche Version) In this post I want to introduce some new terrain plates: Hills. As like all my other terrain pieces, I build them from styrofoam. I also use the base plate made from wood on which I glue all the other things.
I defined the height of the hills as 5 cm, this fits to the 28 mm figures. Let's figure out the transition between two terrain pieces. This has to be the same for all hill pieces for being able to combine the terrain in any way. I build the hill from 5 plates of 1 cm thickness which are 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 cm width. The scheme looks like this:
Now you can build the first basic shapes: Edges and corners. For a corner you need 5 pieces in the size of 12x12, 11x11, 10x10, 9x9, 8x8 cm. These are glued on top of each other fitting to one edge.
Now, this looks a bit like a hill. To improve it, you can easily tear off parts out of the styrofoam which looks a bit more like rocks than the 5 plates before.
Now you have to paint the hill. The two plains in brown and the rest in grey. All the grey parts are then drybrushed in white and then grass is put on the plains.
I would suggest to tear off more styrofoam than in this picture (this was my first try so it does not look that good). You can now build additional pieces like edges or inner corners.
The elevated plain is simply a 6 cm thick block of styrofoam glued on a wooden base plate.
I defined the height of the hills as 5 cm, this fits to the 28 mm figures. Let's figure out the transition between two terrain pieces. This has to be the same for all hill pieces for being able to combine the terrain in any way. I build the hill from 5 plates of 1 cm thickness which are 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 cm width. The scheme looks like this:
Tabletop terrain - the castle part II: tower
(Deutsche Version) Basically a castle consists of three parts: Walls, turrets and at least one gate. Let's continue with the second part of the castle, i.e. the tower.
At first the plan: The tower has to be connected to the wall on both sides. I defined the area of the tower to 12x12 cm. This means that there has to be 4 cm of wall on each side of the tower.
The tower consists of three 6 cm thick styrofoam plates which are cut to 12x12 cm and then glued on top of each other.
As a next step, the small wall pieces on the side are built. Therefore two blocks of 12x4 cm are cut out of the 6 cm thick styrofoam. As the last step, the platform on top has to be built: A 14x14 cm big plate out of the 1 cm styrofoam has to be equipped with merlons. I used two parts which are 14 cm long and two parts which are 12 cm long to create the merlons as depicted below. Additionally you need merlons for the small wall pieces on the side which are 4 cm wide and fit to the other wall.
Afterwards, you have to paint everything, similar to the instructions in the wall post.
The tower consists of three 6 cm thick styrofoam plates which are cut to 12x12 cm and then glued on top of each other.
Tabletop terrain - the castle part I: wall
(Deutsche Version) I always liked sieges very much, therefore there had to be some kind of castle in my terrain. At first I will start with the easiest part of my castle. A straight piece of wall.
The first thing you have to consider is how to fit two wall pieces together. My plan is the following:
On the left, you can see how the merlons should look like. On a transition from one wall peice to another, two 1 cm wide high pieces meet and form a "normal" 2 cm wide high piece:
The wall is made of styrofoam, I use a 6 cm thick plate for the wall and another 1 cm thick plate for the merlons. This is now glued together and then painted. Prior to painting:
The first layer of colour - I use full-shade tinting colour which you can buy cheaply.
As a next step (and to improve the look) I use a method called drybrush. The brush is dipped into a little colour which is then wiped off onto a piece of paper. Now you simply take the dry brush and brush above the grey colour - you can see the result here:
I think that the structure of styrofoam (which you can see even better after dry brushing) looks pretty good. Alternatively you could use extruded polystyrene (XPS), this material has a flat surface and can be cutted more easily. If you want to see any structure, you have to scar this into the XPS. This can look better than with styrofoam but is more expensive and takes more time.
The first thing you have to consider is how to fit two wall pieces together. My plan is the following:
Tabletop terrain - a lake
(Deutsche Version) Constructing a lake is pretty simple. At first you have to create a basic terrain plate. Afterwards you draw the lake onto it:
Now cut/tear out the lake from the styrofoam:
As a next step, paint everything brown. Afterwards paint the lake blue. To have a better optical result, you can also glue some sand to the edge of the lake:
Now add some grass:
And if you want to, you cann add some Iceland moss:
Tabletop terrain - the first plate
(Deutsche Version) Let's start with the first and easiest plate: Grass. The Plate looks like this:
The plate consists of a 10 mm thick MDF plate topped by a 10 mm styrofoam plate (this makes is possible to have structures which are up to 1 cm deeper than the basis height). On top there is a layer of grass. You can buy grass at a cheap price at ebay. To glue the grass to the plate, I use a 1:1 mixture of Ponal Holzleim and water. This allows you to spread the glue all over the plate before it is dry. As a colour, I use wall paint, this is quite cheap. Alternatively I used spray colours, unfortunately they are quite expensive (but easy to apply).
This is the basic construction of the terrain plate. One problem left to solve is to prevent the movement of the plates. If you would use the plates like they are now, they could move and there appear gaps. Therefore I had to think of a simple principle to have the plates to lock to each other. On the bottom side of each plate, there is a triangle at each corner which pokes out and a notch which locks to such a triangle. The triangle and notch look like this:
I use a wooden bar of the size 20x10 mm which is cut into pieces of the lengths 4 and 2 cm. The long piece fits with the long edge to a diagonal of the plate to have the corners to coincide. The short piece has to fit on the other side of the diagonal so that its other corner coincides with the edge of the plate.
If you fit two plates together it looks like this:
Respectively for 4 plates:
As a next step, I plan to put magnets on the bottom of the plates so the plates will stick to each other. Currently I have to wait for the magnets, as soon as they arrive, I will report the progress.
If you already have constructed 3 plates, the gluing of the bars is quite easy. You just have to place 3 plates in the shape of an L and fit another plate to them. Now you can simply glue the bars into place.
This is the basic construction of the terrain plate. One problem left to solve is to prevent the movement of the plates. If you would use the plates like they are now, they could move and there appear gaps. Therefore I had to think of a simple principle to have the plates to lock to each other. On the bottom side of each plate, there is a triangle at each corner which pokes out and a notch which locks to such a triangle. The triangle and notch look like this:
If you fit two plates together it looks like this:
If you already have constructed 3 plates, the gluing of the bars is quite easy. You just have to place 3 plates in the shape of an L and fit another plate to them. Now you can simply glue the bars into place.
Tabletop terrain - basics
(Deutsche Version) You do not necessarily need a terrain for tabletop games. Usually a carpet or table is also suitable. Unfortunately, this does not look that good and also tactical depth is missing, given by obstacles, hills, rivers and others.
To improve the look, you can buy a cheap gaming mat which come in different looks like grass, desert and several more. Alternatively, you can use a felt mat. To improve the tactical depth, you can use terrain pieces which you just have to place on the mat (e.g. hills or a forest).
To achieve a higher level of good-looking, you could think of building your whole terrain out of one piece. For someone who has a lot of space this is suitable, otherwise you should ask yourself where to store a 1.2x1.8 m big plate which even has a sensitive and rough surface.
The optimal solution is now a modular gaming table. There exist several companies which sell them like Ziterdes, Citadel or Kallistra.
The terrain pieces of Ziterdes and Citadel are quite alike, both consist of 60x60 cm plates which can feature hill corners. Citadel is much more expensive than Ziterdes, both have little diversity (there are hill corners, for the plates of Ziterdes there are also rivers but that's all), in addition, the plates are quite big so there are only few alternatives of how to combine the plates.
Personally, I like Kallistra, the terrain consists of hexagons which can be combines like in The Settlers of Catan. There is a wide range of hexagons like rivers, hills, bridges and even modular castles. Unfortunately, Kallistra is designed for the 15 mm scale, this means that 28 mm figures would stand on very small towers and walls. This is the only reason why I didn't buy the terrain from Kallistra, whoever does not need a fortress can use the Kallistra terrain.
With all the possible systems not being suitable for me I decided to build my own terrain. The basic principle is similar to Citadel/Ziterdes: I use plates which can be combined modularly. I decided to use a edge length of 20 cm to have more possible combinations. My terrain is designed to have several different aspects like the Kallistra terrain: Hill corners and edges, lakes, high plateaus, fortresses and maybe even sea. In the next posts, I will explain how I built the terrain respectively how you can build the terrain (and spend not that much money). To have a comparison, I want to show some basic prices of the terrain.
Ziterdes: A 60x60 cm plate (painted and some grass on it) costs 28 €, if you buy a set of 6, 22 €. Calculated for a 20x20 cm plate this is about 2.4 €.
Citadel: The 6 plate set (unpainted, no grass) costst 230 €, this is about 38 € per plate respectively 4.3 € per 20x20 cm plate.
Kallistra: A set consisting of 21 plates covers 90x120 cm and costs 50 pounds, with grass 75, this is about 60/90 €. This results in a price of 2.2/3.3 € per 20x20 cm plate.
To have a comparison: For one 20x20 cm plate, I spent about 85 ct, adding grass will result in about 1 €.
To summarize everything: The price to cover an area of 180x120 cm you have to spend:
Ziterdes: 130 €
Citadel: 230 €
Kallistra: 120/180 €
home-made (my terrain): about 54 €
To improve the look, you can buy a cheap gaming mat which come in different looks like grass, desert and several more. Alternatively, you can use a felt mat. To improve the tactical depth, you can use terrain pieces which you just have to place on the mat (e.g. hills or a forest).
To achieve a higher level of good-looking, you could think of building your whole terrain out of one piece. For someone who has a lot of space this is suitable, otherwise you should ask yourself where to store a 1.2x1.8 m big plate which even has a sensitive and rough surface.
The optimal solution is now a modular gaming table. There exist several companies which sell them like Ziterdes, Citadel or Kallistra.
The terrain pieces of Ziterdes and Citadel are quite alike, both consist of 60x60 cm plates which can feature hill corners. Citadel is much more expensive than Ziterdes, both have little diversity (there are hill corners, for the plates of Ziterdes there are also rivers but that's all), in addition, the plates are quite big so there are only few alternatives of how to combine the plates.
Personally, I like Kallistra, the terrain consists of hexagons which can be combines like in The Settlers of Catan. There is a wide range of hexagons like rivers, hills, bridges and even modular castles. Unfortunately, Kallistra is designed for the 15 mm scale, this means that 28 mm figures would stand on very small towers and walls. This is the only reason why I didn't buy the terrain from Kallistra, whoever does not need a fortress can use the Kallistra terrain.
With all the possible systems not being suitable for me I decided to build my own terrain. The basic principle is similar to Citadel/Ziterdes: I use plates which can be combined modularly. I decided to use a edge length of 20 cm to have more possible combinations. My terrain is designed to have several different aspects like the Kallistra terrain: Hill corners and edges, lakes, high plateaus, fortresses and maybe even sea. In the next posts, I will explain how I built the terrain respectively how you can build the terrain (and spend not that much money). To have a comparison, I want to show some basic prices of the terrain.
Ziterdes: A 60x60 cm plate (painted and some grass on it) costs 28 €, if you buy a set of 6, 22 €. Calculated for a 20x20 cm plate this is about 2.4 €.
Citadel: The 6 plate set (unpainted, no grass) costst 230 €, this is about 38 € per plate respectively 4.3 € per 20x20 cm plate.
Kallistra: A set consisting of 21 plates covers 90x120 cm and costs 50 pounds, with grass 75, this is about 60/90 €. This results in a price of 2.2/3.3 € per 20x20 cm plate.
To have a comparison: For one 20x20 cm plate, I spent about 85 ct, adding grass will result in about 1 €.
To summarize everything: The price to cover an area of 180x120 cm you have to spend:
Ziterdes: 130 €
Citadel: 230 €
Kallistra: 120/180 €
home-made (my terrain): about 54 €
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