Part 5 - Will this actually work?

The next part of the process was fairly straightforward. Firstly the areas containing Leipzig and the outlying villages were painted black and then highlighted using a light grey.

The rivers were given several layers of poyurethane varnish as was the large area of marshy land to the south and west of Leipzig.

Irregular areas of the board were painted with watered down PVA glue and then a load of flock dumped on top.

And here you can see the work in progress. Which is where we hit a problem. If any of you have ever tried this sort of thing, it's easy enough to layer the area with flock, but it's tricky to get the excess off. You can turn the board on its side and tap, but then you are faced with having to collect it all up and to be honest our workshop floor isn't that clean. Chris then came up with a great bit of lateral thinking. He suggested fixing some cloth over the end of a vacuum cleaner nozzle. When this was then run over the surface of the table all the loose flock came up a treat and could be collected and put in a container for re-use.

Brilliant! It also had the added bonus of making the stuff that stayed put stand up one end. So, armed with glue, brush, flock and vacuum cleaner we proceeded to apply the green stuff.

Once all the 'normal' areas were covered we set to work on the marsh lands. The idea was to indicate using gloss varnished base colour and a couple of darker shades of flock. Other than the process was exactly the same as outline above.

And after all this effort , we ended up with something looking like this:

We added a few trees and a couple of buildings to the tabletop to give a better idea of what the finished effect was to be. The area of marshland can be seen clearly.

All that is now left to do is to add three bridges and the longer caseway over the marsh. Just as we were contemplating this a parcel arrived from those awfully nice people at Timecast packed full of painted buildings. We couldn't resist the temptation, so here's a couple of pictures of what is very nearly the finished game board:

So there you have it. The game will get its first outing over the weekend of 4th and 5th October 2008 at the World Championships held at Derby University. If we don't all get put away for doing this, I'll round off this report with some pictures of the game in progress.

>>>Click Here>>> to find out what happens to the game when it goes on its first outing.