The Middle-earth™ Strategy Battle Game ,and its amazing potential for dramatic narratives, resonates strongly with many hobbyists. We often feature fantastic creations that celebrate the magnificent world of Middle-earth, but today we’ve got something truly mind blowing. Here’s Lachlan Linton-Keane from Zorpazorp with the lowdown on creating an awe-inspiring Osgiliath gaming board.
I’ve been working on a massive Osgiliath gaming board for over a decade, and when the new Osgiliath box set and Gondor Ruins were announced – I just had to add a whole new city block of flooded cityscape!
My original board at this stage was 40 square feet, made from two 5’x4’ halves stacked full of scratch-built foam buildings. Nothing quite beats the intricate detailing of Games Workshop plastic scenery, but to match the large scale of my original board, I was going to need a LOT of kits.
Luckily the folks at Warhammer Community came to the rescue and fired over 100 sprues of the new Osgiliath Ruins. The filming of our massive Osgiliath Campaign was just around the corner, and the pressure was on to finally complete this war-torn Gondorian city.
My first step was to summon a bunch of mates, arm ourselves with clippers and scalpels, and clean up all the sprues. This took a staggering 23 hours, but it was essential to complete this phase first so that the momentum of building such a massive city layout wasn’t interrupted by constantly clipping out important pieces.The kits are yet another clever modular masterpiece from the hands of Ray, the scenery master of the Warhammer Design Studio. Each sprue is stunningly detailed, with all sorts of Gondorian-style windows, walls, and doors. I was acutely aware that I was probably the only person outside of Warhammer World with this many kits to work with, so I decided to stay true to the Zorpazorp motto of ‘stupidly massive’ and build three ruined skyscrapers for a truly epic sense of scale.
My first big decision was to only add flooring every two stories, which is not only perfect for gameplay as it creates easy access to models, but also conserved lots of floor tiles for extra bridges and gangways. My other top technique was assembling the buildings with many of the ruined tiles flipped upside down.
Inverting the pieces allowed us to create cool impact holes in the sides of our taller, more intact buildings, as if a catapult shot had blasted the side out of our mighty structures. It also kept to a good ratio of intact and ruined wall pieces – something essential with such tall structures.
The floor and wall tiles lock together perfectly, and so I was able to glue together the buildings in storeys, securing the walls to their corresponding floors below but not above. This meant the whole structure could be pulled apart for storage and also made the scenery fully destructible.
We’ve even written some house rules into our campaign – if those pesky Mordor catapults hit the buildings, parts of the structure can collapse! We lift off the ruined top level, pull out a middle section, and then replace the top, it then looks like the upper building has been blasted off.
With three towers completed, and linked with gangways made from more floor and wall tiles, I decided to make a flooded city docks section. This would give Gothmog’s amphibious assault rafts a perfect landing point from which to begin their attack.
The five buildings of this section were constructed in interesting shapes, and with small gangways linking them both to each other and to the massive towers, allowing players to choose between fighting in the treacherous, submerged city streets or across the ruined upper levels. Choose your peril, sons of Gondor!
After a simple paint scheme with some spray cans, dry brushing, washes, and weathering, it was time to cover them in rubble and water. To create this effect, we drowned the entire 60 square feet of Osgiliath in over 100 pounds of epoxy resin to represent the waters of the river Anduin.
The board is now flooded, the armies are moving and the great Battle of Osgiliath is about to begin! You can check out a whole playlist of videos we made about this project on the Zorpazorp YouTube channel.
Thanks so much Lachlan, truly a project to make even Celebrimbor proud. The Osgiliath Ruins are currently available in the Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game: Battle of Osgiliath boxed set, but they will be released separately in the near future. Sign up for the Warhammer Community letter to receive the first word of their release.