Down At The Club

It's been ages since I posted music here. I couldn't resist posting this as a preface to a photo post about Sunday's game at MAWS:



The main reason is to show our latest table set-up:



This shows our 650 point Field of Glory Renaissance game on a 5' by 3' table featuring an Italian Wars French (me) army against an, in period, Early Russian (Graham) army. The picture is taken just after Graham's first move. The novel feature for us was the first use of a new game mat cut from an out door grass mat I bought from Lidl a few years ago for £5.99 in 2010. Amazingly, these are still available at £7.99 if you can find UK stock left.

I'd intended to use two to make a 6' by 4' table top at home. Although the surface texture is fine the mat is only 39" deep so I bought two and put them away whilst I figured out how to hide the join. Being a typical wargamer I promptly forgot about them until recently. I rediscovered them when I was putting something else away and decided to cut one up to make a 5' by 3' "cloth". The mat has a rubberised backing and it cuts easily with a sharp Stanley type blade. In ten minutes I had a new mat.

Up until now we have used a GW "Battle Mat" which is far superior in colour, texture and size and we'll still use it for 6' by 4' games. However, for a 5' by 3' game we were wasting five or ten minutes marking the edges with string and clamping the cloth to the table. The new mat is heavy enough to lay flat immediately and the rubberised backing means it doesn't need clamping. Finally, the mat is robust enough to roll and transport: there's no risk of it shedding flock for instance.

What surprised both Graham & I was how small the 5' by 3' playing area looked when surrounded by bare table edges. There's a real visual difference between playing on a marked off rectangle and a custom mat. It didn't make any difference once we started playing but there was a distinct double take when the mat was first laid on the table.

To finish a shot of Graham in action: