I've been remiss in posting lately, but
real life and other projects have taken priority lately. Here's to
getting back to it.
A few weeks ago, I sent for and
received a copy of
Setting The Scene: Winter Wargaming – A Guide
For Creating A Winter Layout For The Games Table by Pat Smith.
I'd been reading Pat's blog,
Wargaming with Silver Whistle, and his Chain of
Command reports. Each post is filled with beautiful photography of
some really great scenery, so when I had the money, and they were
available for purchase again, I decided to snap up a copy of his
book.
The short review: I'm not disappointed.
The book is laid out so that, with a
couple of exceptions, each chapter is a single project. The projects
are written as step-by-step tutorials, and include notes on materials
and how to use them. Projects range from roads to buildings to
figures and backdrops. There's a lot of information that covers just
about every part of the game table.
The photographs in
Setting The
Scene focus on gaming set in World War II in the Ardennes, but the
techniques can easily be used for other settings. With my preference
for AWI, for instance, the projects could be used to build a Battle
of Trenton table, or more likely for me, a small skirmish set at the
Shelburne Blockhouse.
The only drawback that I found to the
book is that the photos seems small. They actually aren't, but I'm
used to seeing the same scenery on a bright large screen blog format,
so the printed versions seemed, less, somehow. This is a minor nit
though, and one of my own making, so it's not really a fault of the
book.
For anyone interested in obtaining a
copy of
Setting the Scene, head over to "Painting & Gaming"
at
www.stevenlampon.co.uk.
