This past weekend my 14 year-old daughter surprised me by asking to set the wargames table up with a large Medieval battle, for her to shoot video of for a class project. The table was already covered with my not-quite-finished Charasiab layout, with various interim “scratch” terrain pieces filling in until I manage to finish the final versions, including half the ROAD network that crisscrosses the tabletop, two of the three villages (I used some of my nice Mexican buildings as placeholders for them) as well as the pair of rivers along the East and West edges of the table.
While digging out a stack of dusty boxes full of Medieval troops (It’s been four years since I set up and played a Medieval game!), I came across something else in my storage closet which I had forgotten about: a box of DESERT ROADS built to use with my old Afghan ground-cover before I built my Maiwand terrain-boards.
The roads are all one inch wider than the ones I’m in the midst of making from latex caulk, but they match the latex roads much better than the paper templates that were in place, so… I swapped out the paper for my old desert roads, which there were just barely enough of to go around.
After my daughter was done shooting her epic Medieval conflagration, and the troops, siege equipment and rather impressive castle were all packed back away (Hopefully they’ll come out again to be part of a game in the not too distant future!) I realized… there it was: MY CHARASIAB LAYOUT, virtually complete!
So I asked that same daughter to use the camera in her phone — which is better than mine — to take some pics…
View from the South…
View from the North…
And finally, thanks to inspiration and instructions from my friend and fellow wargamer Dan Gurule, AKA: “Last Stand” Dan, who I met at the 2011 Colonial Barracks convention in New Orleans — and with some vital assistance from the same 14 year-old daughter of mine, who is our family computer graphics expert — I did my first ever “Annotated” iPhoto pic, showing the Charasiab battlefield, which I must say I’m kinda’ excited about and think turned out rather nicely, and also bodes well for things to come:
