Big games!

As a fan of terrain (it's as important as playing the game!) it means that I am also a big fan of BIG games! When I say "big games", I'm talking about large gaming tables; my preferred WWII rule set is Iron Cross, which lends itself well to lots of movement and manoeuvring, so the larger the table, the better the gaming experience.

Here are a handful of photos of some big games that I have participated in over the years. The first set of images is from a demonstration table/game that I helped to build and run at Salute a couple of years ago. The table was 30 feet long by 6 feet wide and was an "imagining" of what the terrain somewhere in Holland might look like. We had some Dutch visitors to the table who were a little perplexed by our setting, but I thought that the table looked cool regardless. Not to pick a fight with them, but the table was created using some reference photos on the outskirts of Neunen, just outside Eindhoven. This was the town that was featured in one of the episodes of Band of Brothers. I can't find any of the photos that we used, but using Google Maps shows some terrain that is close enough.

These first three photos show the tables as they were being constructed. We created 5 "boxes", which were 6 feet wide by 4 feet long and 6 inches deep; we created "boxes", so that we could sink some areas of the gaming surface below the normal level. The buildings were supplied by 4Ground. The individual tables were built in a modular fashion so that they could be placed in a number of different configurations to create different layouts.

The next five photos show the board in a more advanced state of construction where a lot of attention was paid to the vegetation.

The next four photos show the finished board as it was displayed at Salute 2015. The Germans deployed at the church end of the table and the British deployed in the woods at the opposite end.

Another really big gaming table that we created, and played over several days, during a Christmas holiday a few years ago (2014, I think). One of the driving factors behind creating Iron Cross was the desire to create a ruleset that could be scaled up to incorporate loads of units e.g. a couple of companies per side on the table, so that we could get out all of our toys, so we took it to the extreme with this mahoosive table.

From memory, and using the photos for reference, this table was probably 30-36 feet long and between 4 and 6 feet wide at various points. The final battleground was based on another table that had been created for Salute 2016, this time in collaboration with the guys from 4Ground, which is why there are so many of their buildings on the final set of tables. The table that we took to Salute, using all the 4Ground buildings, was based on a scenario set in Villers-Bocage and that table alone was 18 feet long by 5 feet wide. Bigger tables definitely lend themselves to bigger battles and therefore more fun! ;-)

The photos below shows the Villers-Bocage layout, which was the ultimate destination for the attacking Brits. From memory, I think that the scenario we played was a German fighting retreat with some ambushes thrown in for good measure. The length of the table made the terrain a bit of a mish-mash of whatever we could scrounge up to fill such a large amount of space.