Trench Build Pt. 1

Over the past year I have dedicated the lion's share of my time painting little men and frankly need a rest from the brush.  Except for a few Bolt Action machine gun teams, I am going to spend what spare time I have this summer building up my inventory of terrain.  I am a big fan of Dave Graffam models.  In case you aren't familiar with Dave's work, he offers a nice selection of downloadable plans for constructing foamcore structures.  I chose to take advantage of Wargame Vault's Memorial Day sale on DG models, so I will be doing a tutorial on one of those soon.

For the next couple weeks I will be spending my time building a trenchworks for WW2 play (I suppose I could use for ACW too). I checked out a few different tutorials in order to get ideas, so nothing you see here is cutting-edge.  I chose to use polystyrene sections glued to Sintra(flexible PVC sheets).  I'm not sure what size Sintra I used since I didn't bother to measure, but I'm guessing it's  3mm. I have a source to get quite a bit of this stuff in sizable scrap pieces.  Enjoy and stay tuned for part 2.


For the first step I simply cut and shaped my polystyrene pieces.  Afterwards I laid them out on the Sintra and traced the shapes to be cut (on a bandsaw).

Here you can see the Sintra base pieces laid out after being cut.

For the next step I  glued the polystyrene to the base pieces. I chose Gorilla glue since it dries faster and is more secure than PVA or hot glue.

The glue had set enough after about an hour to start filling the gaps between pieces. In the smaller gaps I used Elmer's wood filler. For the larger gaps I chose resin sand. I just slopped this stuff on and smoothed out with no care because the entire berm will be lathered in Durham's Water Putty before painting.

Another Clash in Normandy

Last night we gave Bolt Action another shot and had a much more enjoyable time as the rules are beginning to sink in.  There are a few quirky rules that left a few of us scratching our heads, but all in all it was a fun game and I really like these rules. They are pretty fast-paced which is nice for weeknight meetings with limited time.

As with our other games, this scenario involved a German reinforced platoon consisting of four 7-man fire teams (mixed Wehrmacht and SS with one Fallschirmjager  team), a medium mortar team, a sniper team, and an MG42 team, all lead by a final unit consisting of an officer with an aid.  A U.S. Airborne platoon consisted of almost identical assets with the exception of the fire teams consisting of 8-man teams. The mortar teams on both sides had the advantage of using an attached forward observer.

Unlike our last BA game, this scenario featured 3 tactical objectives (a bridge crossing, a high point in a shelled-out church, and a high point on a ridge).  As expected, the fighting was centered around these three objectives fairly evenly.  Early on a Kraut team was able to win the race to the ridge on the German left, but pulled back when it began to take fire from an AB Pathfinder unit. Later in the battle they also took fire from a .30 cal team and were eventually ambushed and neutralized in hand to hand fighting by said Pathfinders. This team would eventually go on to achieve heroic accolades by taking the last open objective late in the evening.

Bill made a good point in that most of our WW2 battles center around a structure or two in the center of the field that draw the heaviest fighting. I believe our next run at Bolt Action will feature an attack/defend scenario. My thoughts are something Brecourt Manorish with limited to no structures. I better get to work on my trenches and German towed artillery.