The Wonderful Steampunk Designs of Steamboy

You may recall a Japanese animated movie titled Steamboy back in 2004. I just saw it a second time on cable this week and realized how useful to the Victorian sci-fi wargamer. Now the movie was a 10 year effort of Otomo the creator of Akira. As a movie it was a flop. The story line is rather simplistic, but the real letdown IMO was the 2d dimensional characters. The London landscapes and steampunk vehicles are superb.

The British tanks are my favorite design of this film.

My next favorite are the Steam Soldiers, men in steam powered armored suits.

You can see the English language trailer here

Game Boards Update

On Monday we bought an 8'x4' piece of 1/4" MDF board. We had it cut to the various sizes we'll need. These boards will form the bases for the London gaming board. We have enough to make the 4'x4' London board and then some. Progress!

London Playing Board Reffrence

I've been gathering reference photos for the London board.

All of these pictures come from the Granada 1984 TV series Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The most authentically Victorian of any of the Holmes shows. The definitive Sherlock Holmes. You can learn more about the series here

Here is an actual period photo of London. Do you see a comparison?

More from the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Transportation.

Countryside Board

The English countryside is a well ordered pastoral landscape. I remember flying to Heathrow airport as a teen and passing over the manicured fields and towns of southwest England. It looked just like a wargames table from the air. No wonder wargaming is so popular in England!  So now on to my country table; its not fully planed out yet. But I do know I want it to look like a picture I have in a book. Its a picture of a ruin on a hill behind a sleepy village. Sorry I don't have the picture digitized. The ruin in the picture looked something like this:
 
The hill with the ruin will be at one end of the table, a four building village will be in the middle and the far end will have fields and hedges. So you can see, it's sort of planned out.

I'm incorporating a piece of Warhammer scenary into this project as the ruin.  Fortuitously for me, my mate had asked me to assemble a GW ruined tower kit some time back. Since we no longer play Warhammer and I'll be scratch building most of the buildings, this seems like a great idea to me to use this as the ruin.

The kit is called the Dreadstone Blight Now I like this kit, its made from thick styrene and is fairly durable. But, its a GW kit so of course it needs hard work to make it fit together. You'd think after all this time GW would have learned how to make a kit that actually fits together properly! But No they didn't. You'll need to do a fair amount of filing to get the first floor sections to fit together and form a circle. I got as close is I could and then filled in the gaps with putty.

 You can see where the pieces don't fit exactly. This was as close as I was able to get it.

I had to cover up the gaps where the pieces didn't join together properly with putty. That was basically all of them. Also all the pieces have these jig saw puzzle piece edges. I had to fix the edges that are not supposed to connect to another piece by adding additional stones. The skulls on this piece are not as obnoxious as most other GW scenery kits. Even so I wanted to remove some of the warhammer iconography, but the owner (my mate) dis-aloud it. A bit of a shame IMO. I could have replaced it with some crosses to give it less of a warhammer feel.

Stay tuned for the next Countryside Board update.

Game Boards

My mate and I are working on two boards to play EOTD on. One will be a London street board and the other a Countryside board. Both boards will follow a basic semi-modular plan, four rows of 16" x 12" sections. That will be 3 16" wide sections and 12" high sections per row, 4 rows will make a 4'x4' playing surface. Each section will be made of 1/4" MDF boards cut to size. We both live in flats so storage is a major issue. The modular part is based on the standardized section size. This will enable us to move the sections around allowing a different set up each game. This will allow a few different combinations, but over time we can make more 16" x 12" sections to increase the number of combinations. We are hoping to make a few sections that will fit in both the countryside and the London streets. I'm not sure that this will be possible in the end, but we've give it a try. 

I got my table idea from staring way too long at the Night of the Alchemist Table.

Next up early work on the Countryside board.

Lumber Piles

 I made some lumber piles from kitchen matches. I used a medium wood stain to color them. They come in handy for any board set up. The perfect thing for Gentlemen to take cover bind during a Gentlemanly gunfight. I hope you like them.

I made a fire wood pile out of twigs too. I cut the lengths in half to better simulate fire wood. I used a piece of scrap sprue to represent and iron fire wood holder.

Comments welcome and critiques are always welcome.