Terrain Tuesday: Tabletop World Town House

Way back in January I brought some resin buildings for my local gaming club. I have the dubious honour of being the club treasurer. This requires attending every week, but does allow me to spend my free time doing something I appear to have become a little addicted to. That is searching the web for interesting things to buy.

Which takes me back to my purchase. The models are a fantasy town house and cottage from a company called tabletop world. Tabletop world is a small company run by two friends in Croatia.

I brought the models and was very, very impressed. So much so that I wrote up a little article.

Now my painting mojo has returned, I have applied a little paint.

Click pictures to enlarge

The first of these models to get painted was the town house. If I was impressed with the model unpainted, I am overcome once it received a bit of paint. The model just takes paint so well and is so very easy to paint.

I kept to a straight forward colour scheme, and almost all of the basic painting was achieved by dry brushing. I then added a little variety to the roof tiles and stonework by using GWs washes. Simple...

The photos don't really do the model justice, but there are a lot of nice little details and it makes the nicest little building.

What is more, the roof is removable should you want to use for skirmish or role play games.

Oh and the best feature, It is very robust. Even my club members will struggle to damage it! Give them time...

Tabletop world buildings: A review

Occasionally I will buy and paint scenery items for my local wargames club. The main criteria for this scenery are (in order);

1. It must be robust
2. It must be very pretty

Robust and impervious to damage are the critical because of the way wargamers tend to repack scenery at the end of an evenings gaming. I have lost track of the number of damaged items of scenery. This is the main reason why we do not invest exclusively in GW scenery. There are just far too many sticky out bits to break off!

Luckily the club is quite well off for funds, so I am able to experiment a little. One of these experiments arrive through the post yesterday.

 The models are a fantasy town house and cottage from a company called tabletop world. Tabletop world is a small company run by two friends in Croatia. The British pound is doing quite well at the moment so I was prepared to take the risk of ordering a couple of models via the web.

 The product:
I have photographed the models next to a random 28mm empire figure from my collection.

The models are cast in what appears to be a plastic, not resin as I thought when ordering. This means that they will be very capable of standing up to the mishandling that my club members will subject them to.

I sat down today to clean up the models. After a very detailed look, I put down my tools. There was absolutely no cleaning up required at all. No mould lines, no uneven base, nothing. Quite excellent.

The detail on the models is superb. and very well imagined. They will fit in very well into a warhammer world.

 I ordered the models on new years eve and therefore was able to take advantage of a promotion the company were running, which means that furniture was included.

This furniture is equally well modelled and came in excellent condition.
 

 

 The building roofs are detachable with details on the inside. Although this is of no use in WFB, it has a use in mordheim or roleplay environments.

My only complaint is that there is no fireplace depicted next to the chimney stack.

Verdict:
A resounding 10  / 10. Very  very highly recommended!

Spartan Games: Town set - Dystopian wars

In an attempt to encourage playing of Dystopian Wars, a steam-punk game from Spartan games, I have had a go at painting up some scenery.

This latest set is a town scenery set. The game is played at a 1:1200 scale so these models are pretty small. For example the doors are approximately 1.5mm high.

To break up the collection I have painted in three main styles. The models above are stone with a slate roof. The remaining town buildings are brick with either clay or slate roof tiles.

There are 10 small houses, 4 medium houses, one manor house and a civic building. All told excellent value and sufficient to have a good go at making a small village. The models are well defined and easy to paint. This collection and the industrial set took a combined 5 painting sessions to paint the lot. I didn't worry too much about painting tidy because I am confident that my gaming club will have these wrecked pretty soon, but I am confident that these will add to our playing pleasure.

Now, all I need is an affordable sea!

Spartan Games: Industrial set - Dystopian wars

Almost two years ago a number of local plays brought Dystopian Wars miniatures from Spartan games and gave it a go. Despite the fact that the games were quite fun, for some reason the game failed to catch on. It may have been something as simple as the messy way the first edition rules were arranged within the book.

Now that some time has passed, a number of players have painted up their fleets and we are prepared to give the game another chance. We thought we would start with a few simple games with the standard fleet and then move up from there.

To support the effort, I have invested in some scenery items. The figures on this page are the contents of the Industrial set. Now it is important to remember that these are at 1:1200 scale, so are quite tiny. For example, the doors are around 1.5mm high! 

Finally, I was asked by Joe for a comparison shot between a Kingdom Death figure and figures from another manufacturer. I have included a photo here with two GW empire figures. I have raised up the GW figures so the bottom of shoe height is roughly the same. You will see that there is a massive difference between a 28mm GW model and the 32mm KD figure...

A little more fantasy scenery

If your club is anything like mine,then it will have an insatiable appetite for scenery. We recently provided the tables and scenery for a tournament at Legionary 2012, and were able to field 12 fantasy and 5 40k tables with no problem what-so ever; however when I ask what the club members want to spend the club monies on, the answer is always more scenery please.

In a vain attempt to sate this desire, I have plonked together two more fantasy pieces. A magic circle and an arcane ruins. The scenery is all GW and comes from their Arcane ruins set.  

The scenery needed a little help from my greenstuff to help hide some of the joins. I also made a simple hexagon for the centre of the magic circle by scribing into a piece of plastic card. I think every magic circle needs a focal point, don't you?

I painted in a fairly standard grey build up, with a few washes for effect. All in all a nice simple and quick construction.

Back soon,have fun!

Wizard House

My local wargames club are always on the lookout for new scenery, but we have a very small number of club members who are willing to build or paint the pieces. Our scenery also tends to take quite a bashing from the club members. So when looking for new terrain recently I was looking for a ready made piece that would be nice and robust.

With this in mind I elected to buy the "wizards House" made by Ziterdes.

The model comes as a single piece, therefore no assembly is required. It is also made of hard foam and so will be very resistant to the level of abuse my club members can hand out. The only things that put me off when buying was the price and the uninspiring paint job that is given to the model.

The Manufacturer have chosen to undercoat (poorly) the model in grey and the roof in a dark red. This takes the eye away from what is a pretty nice model.

After giving it a good undercoat it is a whole different model.

What I love most of all with this model are the great details.
 
The model includes quite a good broom, a great bird box and quite a fun lunch table.

All in all, very strongly recommended.
 

Tomb Kings scenery

You know what it is like. You attend a show and any money you have on you, starts burning a whole in your pockets. Next thing you know you are walking around with a bag of goodies.

In my case the goodies in question was a selection of resin scenery from a company called The Square. Although they have a website, they only sell if you send them a cheque or meet them at a show. Whilst I was at Legionary on Saturday, I took advantage of their attendance. Although they have quite a broad range of nice looking pieces, I choose to go for a number of desert style resin casts to complement the Tomb king armies that are no doubt going to appear at the club in the coming weeks.

The figures are excellent value with a nice selection brought for a little over £15 (the advantage of club discount and a nice smile).

The resin is nice and dense and should stand up to a good amount of rough handling. I opted to add real sand to the base before painting. There are a number of air holes that could do with filling, but I elected to paint without making good and I don't think they are too excessive to distract from the quality of the pieces.

Size wise they are great for warhammer figures, but I plan to use the Sphinx figures either side of the steps of a building.

The sand was painted using the guide given on page 56 of WD377. To paint the sandstone terrain I started with vermin brown, worked up layers of drybrushing through 1:1 vermin brown & Tausept Ochre -> Tausept Ochre -> 1:1 Tausept Ochre & Dheneb Stone -> Dheneb stone. I followed this with a liberal wash of Ogryn flesh.

Broken needle base 

 Cleopatra's needle

 

that's a nice pair of sphinx you have there sir!

I have added a random skeleton figure to give a sense of scale.



Pegasus Hobbies River sets

Pegasus Hobbies make some good quality, very low cost scenery items and when it comes to buying robust scenery for a club, they are a must have. The only problem is that they are sometime hard to get in Britain.

When I completed the statistical analysis of what scenery you were likely to roll in an 8th Edition Warhammer game, it showed that you have a 59% chance of needing a river. Playing since the edition was released has confirmed we needed to buy more river...

So we set about getting two river sets. One set is just a little too short to covers a gaming tables needs.

When I say getting the river sets is the only problem, that is not quite true, the other one is that they are a little too brightly painted for my liking.

So I set about toning them down a little..

First Job, add some sand:

This photo shows two sets drying in my back yard. As you can see here, you get two 45 degree bends, two 12" straight lengths and two 6" length in each set.

The next job is just to paint in the normal way, flock and add a bit of water effect...

Voila:

Warhammer - Hordes: Hill Fort scenery

Mid week I started tarting up old and underused bits of scenery. The process has moved on a step. Previously I took tired looking hill and unused ruins and combined them by gouging out small pits in the hills to mount the ruins; and by making walls from bits of card.

I then gave the whole ensemble two hearty coverings of PVA to give them some protection. The guys at the club tend to throw them around a bit and packing away is always done at speed, so they need all the protection they can get. I then covered in sand in the normal way.

Once again, I gave a substantial covering of PVA. It never hurts to help protect them. The club has adopted a standard colour scheme for all of our scenery, and it has made a dramatic improvement to the way all the pieces of scenery fit together. To match the colour scheme, the hills are undercoated black, painted scorched brown and dry brushed bleached bone. Flock is then added in a patchwork effect.

These items can either be used individually as singke ruins or collectively to give the impression of a much larger ruined fortification.