The German Walled Town

Today's post brings me to the late 1980's, when I fell in love with gaming the Seven Years War. I built some generic German villages and these town walls, which served as backdrop mostly. 

The walls were built from foamcard and balsa, the towers from empty drinks cans and their upper part some sort of cardboard packaging tube. Stonework was done via the Ian Weekley method of random card stones glued on then heavily washed with filler. Flat roof surfaces were from the Wills sheets. The curved roofs were made using two or three cones of thin card and then covered in thin card tiles. The finials (the bronze widgets at the points of each roof) were made from mapping pins and Milliput. The posters on the city gates were photocopied from books and then shrunk to a suitable size; they are actual recruitment adverts from the Seven Years War, or "wanted" posters for Prussian deserters!

The whole thing was built in two sections each with a cobblestone "floor". The idea was you could use either one on the edge of the board, put them together and fill with buildings, or place them on the two sides of a river, which was the situation with many walled towns. I did plan to make some specific buildings to fill the town with, but that never happened apart from the domed church here, so for these photos it is filled up with village buildings. The stone house was a resin casting I just improved a bit and painted. The two churches were built by Peter Gilder's method, ie solid structures with cast windows just glued onto the outside.

The figures posed in these photos are all French SYW units: the Grenadiers Royaux, mounted Chasseurs de Fischer, staff and vignettes and finally allied Saxon infantry. They are Front Rank figures, but some are heavily converted from all sorts of sources. The little vignettes look great for photos, or maybe a demo game, but we found they were mainly an obstruction if you were trying to play an actual game! 

And we did play a lot of really good SYW games for about ten years in all. Apart from me the gang was Garry Broom, who painted literally thousands of figures, for a while Alec Brown of Front Rank Miniatures, and our late, much-missed friend Mark Sturmey. I did a lot of research into the period, which led me to the British Library where I dug out arcane texts in eighteenth-century French and gothic-script German. Most of this stuff is now available at a glance, in English too, on the Kronoskaf site, which I will link to. I wrote a set of SYW rules based on this research, which for a long time I was more proud of than any terrain making. I nearly got them to the point of publishing. Nearly!