Minefields!

Boom! Shake the room.

In the latest Tier of the Wotan’s Night campaign, I have found myself at the bottom of the rankings. Do not fear, as I have also received a compensatory bonus of a useful Strategic Asset: Minefields!

In order to give our campaign battles a modicum of flavour and to balance the books a little given that different players are given different bonuses to mix things up (a sentiment that our current ‘Winning’ player, Laur, has vocally disagreed to time and time again. Next campaign will no doubt be managed by him!), these Strategic Assets from the Apocalypse rulebook has been injected into our weekly games of 40K, plenty of which we will now be using in the impending 4th tier.

Having received the Minefields asset, I found myself wondering how to represent this on the board?

The description in the rulebook is that it is a single minefield about 6 inches wide and a whopping 36 inches long! Or it could be split into 2no. 18 inch long minefields, or alternatively 3no. 12 inch long fields. Each field represents an area of both difficult AND dangerous terrain, which is set out during the deployment stage either in my deployment zone, or within the ‘no-man’s land’ .

At this juncture it is handy point out that I’ve not been the only person to have puzzled this quandary on how to best represent this modelling opportunity in the field of 40K. This excellent guide produced by the now sadly defunct (I believe) website, ‘Battlebarge’, has been key.

As with the guide, I have elected to create a set of ‘markers’ to denote the appropriate minefield area, also for ease of transport, storage, deployment, and speediness of creation. Here’s a photo, with a Justicar for scale.

I made these using spare bits of plasticard and leftover gribbly-dangly bits I had from spare plastic sprues. Pretty convenient! All I had to do left was figure out how to paint an appropriate ‘warning’ sign, so I elected to use the standard skull and crossbones on red.

I was quite pleased with the overall knee-height of the warning signs, laid down low to draw one’s eye-level to the ground. Perhaps we may use these markers again as part of a terrain setup in future games, who knows?

At the end of the day, not as elaborate as Emperor’s Wrath’s creation, despite it's wonderful origin in the kitchen-sink scrappiness such as here:

Or as immaculate the GW-approved and produced minefield markers as seen here:

But I had plenty of fun making mine!  Hope you have fun when you get round to making yours too!