Building a Wargaming Table for Crete

After posting about the various forces (Fallschirmjager, Gebirgsjager and Allies and a creating a little diorama) over the last few months, which I have been preparing for a WWII scenario representing Operation Mercury (or Unternehman Merkur!) set in 1941 Crete, I have now made a start on building the table and accompanying terrain.

The table is 8 feet wide by 6 feet deep, so plenty big enough for a good-sized game using 28mm figures. I made a winter themed table last year and didn't want to lose it, so I have created another "table" for my desert board, which sits on top of the winter one; when the weather turns a bit colder again, I can whip the desert board off and resume gaming on a winter landscape again. 

Rather than limit myself to creating a board just for the Crete scenario, I decided to make the base board a more generic Mediterranean-themed board and then use terrain pieces to adapt it for various battles in the Mediterranean theatre. Using specific terrain pieces means that I can turn it from a sparse desert board into something that would suit Crete or Sicily or Italy.  The bare board, with some hills to break up line of sight, could also be used for some of the desert fighting in North Africa e.g. Tobruk to El Alamein.

I was inspired to recreate the Battle for Crete after reading Crete: The Battle and The Resistance by Anthony Beevor.  Another fantastic book on the Mediterranean theatre, which covers the much-neglected topic of the war in Syria is Invasion Syria 1941 by Henri de Wailly.  Whilst I am on the subject of books for this theatre, others which I have enjoyed are The Desert War and Italy's Sorrow; A Year of War both by James Holland; Anzio: Italy and the Battle for Rome by Lloyd Clark; and The Day Of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy by Rick Atkinson.

I started off by making a wooden frame, which looked a bit like a wooden bed frame - I forgot to take photos of the initial build process! The next step was to fit sheets of roofing insulation into the frame and glue them together using a couple of tubes of B&Q's own brand no-more-nails.

Next job was filling in the cracks between the edges of the insulation sheets. I used a ready-mixed filler from B&Q, though I wouldn't recommend using this because it shrinks when it dries. This meant that I had to fill the cracks three times in some places!

One method that I used to cover up some of the cracks, but also create a bit of visual interest, was to glue some ripped up cork tiles onto to the board.  This created some small hills with rough edges...the sort that you see in the Med.

With the basic board layer completed, the next step would normally be to start painting it. I say, normally, because after watching several videos by Luke APS - Geek Gaming, I decided to experiment and make some of the ground covers that he uses so effectively.  A "ground cover" is a mixture of sand, coloured tile grout and grit, which is applied using PVA glue and then sealed using watered down PVA.  

Before applying the ground cover, I decided to seal the insulation board using some more of the Diall wall filler.  I liberally applied this with a trowel and scraped it across the board to get a thin coating.  I then used a bit of cloth, patted this flat onto the still-wet filler and then pulled it off.  This created an artex-like texture to "rough up" the surface of the board.  Remember what your ceiling looked like in the 1970s and 80s?

I built up some of the edges of the raised cork tiles to remove the uniformity of the edges using more of the cheap Diall filler, then left it to dry overnight.  I only applied a thin layer of filler because I didn't want to create too many bumps, which would limit where I will be able to place free-standing terrain pieces later on.  The rocky outcrops only cover about one-sixth of the board.

Another step to complete before applying the ground cover is to slap on a base coat of paint.  I used a cheap emulsion paint from B&Q in a yellowish-brown/tan sort of colour, then again left this to dry for a few hours.  The winter table I built (in the winter) took days to dry out because it was cold and damp. It is summer now, so I had the door and windows of the summer house open to get a good breeze blowing through.

Once dry, the paint colour was a bit lighter.

I applied a watered down dark brown around the edges, and in the gullies, of the rocky outcrops to create some forced shading.

The final phase was to apply the ground cover. I made my own after watching some of Luke's videos using sharp sand from the builder's merchant, a handful of dark, gritty sand from the beach near to home and some ivory-coloured, powdered tile grout.  The board was painted with neat PVA glue and then the ground cover was scattered over the top and left to dry.  Final step was to spray over the top with watered down PVA glue to seal it all together. Watch Luke's videos for a far better explanation!

After creating the first ground cover mix, I decided that it was too white. It looks quite dark in the photo above, but that is because it is wet with the glue and also features some of the other colour mixes that I made (see below). When it dries out, it reverts back to the original colour in the tub, but with a bit of the paint colour showing through if you only lightly apply the ground cover.  You can build up layers, or even mounds of the ground cover, to make a less flat surface.

A lesson I learned, which Luke has not covered in any of his excellent videos (I cannot recommend his work highly enough) is that you don't actually need very much of any of the materials. I picked up a bag of sand from the builder's merchant (5 kilos, I think) and cannot imagine that I will use more than half a bucket's worth. Likewise, with the tile grout: a small handful is all that is required to colour the sand. The sand I used was light in colour and adding the ivory tile grout lightened it even further (Luke didn't mention that bit, lol). 

So I went into the garage and had a rummage around and found an almost empty bag of some gritty red sand, so I mixed up another tub of ground cover, but added a lot more red into it. 

I then found a small tub of yellow weathering powder, so made up a third ground cover with much more of a yellow look to it.  

So I now have three distinctly coloured ground covers, which, when used together to create patches of light and shade on the board, look much better.  I had always wanted more of a ruddy look as the main base coat for the board, which I will then highlight with a lighter shade on top. Much of the Mediterranean that I have visited (I lived there for six years too) seems to be made up up of red or terracotta coloured rocks, which inexplicably turn to a white dust. I figure that the rocks contain a lot of iron oxide, which leaches out as the rocks are turned to dust, leaving that powdery white colour. The fourth tub (mostly black) in the photo below is a coarse grit mix that I made from several handfuls of grit scraped off the road (don't tell the council!) and a handful of coarse sand.

I used the coarse grit to build up some of the edges of the rock outcrops; this was held down with a decent amount of PVA glue, with more ground cover sprinkled over the top and then sealed with watered down PVA.

Now that I have settled on the main base colours of ground cover, I have moved onto making up lots of terrain pieces to place on the board, so have paused on the board for now. It makes a useful working surface when building terrain pieces. The picture above still looks quite dark because it was taken with wet glue underneath the ground cover. I will post up some photos soon-ish to show the finished table.