An old project revived

When I retired six years ago I began a wargame project encompassing the whole of the second world war, to be played in the form of individual battles in 6mm (1:285-1:300 scale) day by day.

Well, 78 months later I have reached 4th September 1939 and the Poles are launching a counter-attack against the Germans. At the current rate of 1 game day per 26 months it will take about 4,000 years before I finish this campaign!

Anyway, back to the game in hand. By rolling a few dice I determined that the battlefield is the “numbered end” of Squad Leader board 39, oriented as below.

I need to recreate this terrain using 10cm hexagon tiles. I enjoy a challenge.

After several abortive attempts over about four days I finally came up with a game map that I can create using Kallistra hexagon tiles. I can only fit an area of 13×9 hexagons on my 4ft x 3ft board, so I selected the area to include the road at the north side of the map.

I came up against numerous issues with contours, and I have asked Kallistra if they can produce four new tiles which currently are only possible by cutting and glueing existing tiles. These are slopes with one high point and four low edges or one low point and four high edges.

But using existing available tiles, my schematic planning map, with the number of tiles of each type needed, is shown below.

I have needed to adapt the map to create plateaux where there should be ridges for the reasons explained above. Also I have no sloping marsh hexes – and why would I? I wonder why Avalon Hill designers included such a terrain feature in the first place.

The next step is to rummage about in my storage boxes to find (or buy) the 282 hexagon tiles (or 6 hex combinations as “stackers”) and model any extra roads needed for the game.

More news as it develops.