Terrain Placement – We’re Doing It all Wrong?
I saw something really interesting about terrain at my last big event and I’ve been rolling it over in my head. I think we are handling terrain all wrong in wargaming.
So lets’s talk a minute about how most players place terrain for 99% of games we play. I bet it goes something like this:
-I put down something
-You put down something
-I put down something
-20 GOTO 10
-Eventually someone says “enough”
-We both nudge the terrain a little and end up with something that looks roughly like this:
Time to play!
But when I was at both Adepticon and Wargamescon I saw how the Battlefront event staff runs their tables. Here is just one of their tables:
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| a sample battlefront event table |
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| each table’s terrain is in a box like this |
You will notice that each table has all of it’s own terrain packed up in a single box and that box has picture of exactly how that table is supposed to be set up.
So while the players across Flames of War nationals play on a variety of tables, each of those tables represents a place. And those places move around the nation, so as a player travels around the tournament circuit, they may end up on a familiar battleground.
Which means that local experience has now been added to an otherwise normal wargame. And that really got me thinking. Because local experience is a huge part of real world generalship. Hunting around for that perfect battlefield on which to engage, the sense of homefield advantage, knowing every nook and cranny of battling on a particular piece of land is something most of us gamers never experience. But it is one of the most important pieces of so many pivotal real world battles.
Now I’m sure, the Battlefront guys just did this as a quick and easy scheme to setup and teardown tables for their events – but I think they really stumbled onto something really, really cool.
Whenever I was playing games on my random setup, “random splatter” terrain boards, I admit I felt a bit jealous and kept glancing over to the FoW area. Somehow knowing that they were playing in a place (maybe it’s still there – could I visit it?) made my game a little sillier, more abstract, and less dramatic.
I don’t know what the answer is for other games and gamers, but I can’t help but feel that its something every club should experiment with a bit. Maybe just try it on a table or two and see what happens. Craft 1-2 really amazing tables that have a “realistic” feel to them, draw a quick chart on each, so anyone can set them up easily and leave them up all the time. Heck, give them cool names like “Horseshoe Canyon” or “Colonel’s Lament”, go crazy. I wonder what would happen? Would players avoid them, or line up to play?
Shouldn’t we all demand an occasional battlefield that match the standards of our own beloved miniatures and armies?
Local Experience in wargaming – what do you think?
