Dawn of the Lead

Every miniature gamer dreams of a beautiful gaming board. Yes, even the ones saying that  piles of books covered with cloth and sand will do. A good, permanent table with no corner cutting in its construction. With none of the mishmash collection of chunks of cardboard and insulation foam and soda cans that we use as proxy terrain, but instead all those expensive but beautiful resin pieces, plastic and cork buildings (for the latter, check out Matakishi’s teahouse) and terrain painted and flocked in a uniform style. Anyone who’s ever wargamed will know what I mean.

As a kid I used to look at model railway setups and doll houses, and was fascinated by the intricate detail. You had climbers on mountain sides, people running to catch a train and tiny vegetables on tiny plates with tiny utensils to eat them with. I absolutely wanted to build something like that, but when you’re twelve you’re on a pretty tight budget. Skip forward 15 years, and I’m still on a pretty tight budget but with a lot more determination and vision. And thus was born my Suburbia project.

Suburbia will be a detailed gaming board depicting a small modern town, to be ravaged by zombies, vampires, werewolves, supervillains, aliens and all sorts of other nasty critters I can think of. It will be composed of O scale plastic model railway buildings (especially Plasticville) and resin accessories from companies such as Armorcast and Ainsty. While this will set me back quite a few euros, it will hopefully also provide me with motivation to get the thing finished. And while I’m doing this, I want to add a whole lot of small detail: crows on the cemetery’s tombstones (a shamelessly ripped idea, thanks Sho3box!), a small altar in the church, small critters running around town, trash in alleys..you name it! As a matter of fact name it, all ideas are more than welcome.

As for inspiration, I have a few sites from which to draw with the main players being the insanely cool Zombie Town! and the almost equally cool Combat Zone Chronicles. I have to admit that I won’t be going as far as ZT! in the interior detailing. I mean, I still want to finish the project in the forseeable future.

The board will probably be built on a fairly large sheet of 2cm thick MDF. I’m thinking of using magnetic receptive paint and small sheet magnets to help keep things like street furniture in place. I will paint a street grid on the table, with each terrain piece – be it a building, a park or whatever – mounted on a separate piece of plasticard that neatly fits the grid. This should provide me with a setup that’s easily modified and solid enough not to go flying around every time someone bumps the table.

I will post regular updates once the project starts. At the moment I’m still designing the whole thing, and waiting for the 7 Plasticville buildings that I got for cheap off eBay. Do I really need to say I’m really excited about this whole thing?

On the topic of populating my new town, I’m also running out of zombies to paint. As I can’t seem to decide whether to buy new ones from Studio Miniatures, Griffin Miniatures or King Zombie, I’m settling on a compromise of getting them all. Sweetness.