"Terrain for British Afghan Northwest Frontier" Topic

Thinking about jumping into the period and buying some figures at FALL IN. Not sure as to the type of terrain needed to play. Does one need mostly mountains or were most battles fought on hilly but level gound? How do those of you gaming the period depict terrain. Thank you

mostly mountains..but you would'nt be able to play a TSATF game only in realisticly shaped papier maché or similar material mountains..how could you handle melées with castings falling one over the other..or units charging downill?…so the compromise solution would be hills at various levels with enough space for your toys to stand and mantaining a minimum degree of visual cohesion as a unit

Always worth a visit for Colonial gaming:
link

He discusses hills here:
link

Afghanistan contrary to popular belief is not just mountains.

Afghan landscape

I've been looking into it myself for a new project in 10mm

A Pakistani colleague of mine assures me that her home country is largely pine-covered mountains and trout streams.
Come to think of it, a visitor to the US east coast will be presently surprised to find it isn't actually skyscrapers and shopping malls from horizon to horizon. Yet.

Everybody's right!

The Major General's vintage site remains one of if not the single finest online resource for colonial miniature gamers, especially when it comes to terrain for Afghanistan and the North-West Frontier, with stackable contour hills AND his trademark "vertical" mountain profiles, which are simple & easy to build yet incredibly useful for creating "high ground" that does not eat up a tremendous amount of horizontal space on the tabletop.

It's true that some parts of Afghanistan are flat and others are heavily wooded, though the flat aspect does not apply very much to the "frontier" areas. Still, nestled amidst the mountains lie many lush green valleys, often filled with crop-fields and orchards, and crisscrossed with near-ancient irrigation systems consisting of both above- and below-ground canals.

For my own Afghan terrain I have a lot of low "contour" hills and also a lot of larger "rocky hills" made with hardboard bases, builder's foam elevations and a lot of landscaping pine bark wood-chips. Other gamers do a nice job draping a terrain cloth over various materials to create both low hills and high mountains. An question is whether you plan to base your figures singly or on multi-figure stands, as this will of course have a big effect on what sort of scale "high ground" will work for you in a practical sense.

The Second Afghan War, which is where I focus most of my Afghan gaming, included battles fought over mostly flat ground such as at Maiwand, over gentle slopes such as at Futtehabad, over very high ground such as at Ali Masjid and Peiwar Kotal, and over mixed ground such as at Charasiab and Baba Wali, plus a few straight-up major siege battles at the Sherpur Cantonments of Kabul and the walled city of Kandahar, as well as tons of smaller actions and skirmishes over pretty much every form of ground imaginable, from rivers and swamps/marshes to graveyards. Many actions also featured Afghan defensive works known as sangars, made from piled stone, used to fortify positions on both high and low ground.

Still, despite some geographic diversity, most colonial wargamers would probably say that to do justice to gaming the Afghan/NWF theater, you will want to have more "high ground" terrain than for most other wars, and I would agree.

Here's a somewhat distorted pic of my nearly-complete layout for the 1879 battle of Charasiab (built using a combination of historical battlefield maps and Google Earth views for reference) which features some open space but also 7 large rocky hills and 9 single-contour hills…

Here's a similarly-distorted pic showing the reverse view, which allows you see more of the battlefield's open space…

And finally here's a close pic showing one large "rocky wood-chip" hill occupied by tribesmen and Afghan regular artillery…

From my reading on the conflict the Pathans would snipe from sangars they built on mountain tops. If the British attacked up the side of the mountain they would flee to the next mountain ridge. If the British retreated they would charge down the mountain sides to cut up wounded and stragglers.

I am not advocating fighting did not occur in other types of terrain!

Large hills and mountains are required in my opinion otherwise the Afghan conflict end ups looking like Dervishes in the Sudan.

That woodchip mountain is fantastic!

Agree,very nice terrain, check out the Two Fat lardies site and see how they depict high ground and valleys with their Anglo-Boer wars in 6mm (rules in development, when Richard? When? :) and their Spanish Napolonic games.
This is very easy and doable I'm ( I use the same way to do my terrain) and looks very good, you can place other features that depict typical NWF features on top of the core set up. I use cheap washcloths and old towels stained and dyed to depict orchards, rouge ground and farmed areas I even stick rough cork bits to create rough terrain using wood glue wit a heavy drybrush over the whole thing (I cut the terrain shapes out and use wood glue on the edges to prevent too much fraying. My 'dry' terrain works well with the added plus of being packable into a small space too.
Hope this helps.
Cheers happy gaming and Huzzar.

Interesting discussion. I would simply add that, from my experience, given the difficulty of crossing rough ground for Imperial troops in TSATF (Lose high dice) a table with too much hilly terrain will tend to bog down gameplay. I would recommend limiting hills to one third of the table. If you look at the scenario maps in TSATF scenario collection, that seems about right. Certainly no more than half. Unless you plan on restaging an historic hill battle like the storming of the Dargai or Asmai Heights.

generaljl,

I remembered I know a relatively fast, simple and inexpensive way to create decent looking NWF/Afghan hills and mountains and thought it might be helpful to share it.

It lends itself to single-based figures, such as are used for TSATF, and might not work as well if you are using multi-based stands of figures, though it could work if you leave more flat space between the stepped contours.

The material used is recycled foam carpet underlay…

It's widly available at big chain lumber/hardware stores like Home Depot and Lowe's as well as Carpet and flooring stores, and is pretty inexpensive by the square foot -- you will NOT need a roll that big! Sometimes you can find it sitting on the sidewalks in front of locations where they either just installed it and threw out the off-cuts or just removed it to replace the flooring.

The key to making it look appropriate for NWF/Afghan terrain is tearing the contour edges by hand instead of cutting them with scissors, so they get a nicely "jagged" and "rocky" look.

If using 15mm figures you can get away with a single layer of the stuff as a contour, but since it's usually (though not always) only 1/2" thick, I used spray adhesive to glue two layers together and made double-thick contours for my 25mm-28mm armies.

For coloring I spray-painted them a base dark brown and then used a few paler shades of brown and tan, spraying lighter and lighter coats as I went, similar to dry-brushing.

I think they look okay, not "diorama quality" but still pretty good as well as very light and practical, and I think I made an entire table's worth of them in a day or two.

Here's some pics…

Guru, that foam terrain looks absolutely incredible. Very inspiring!

Thanks Daryl! I discovered this stuff and its usefulness for terrain purposes when my wife and I ripped out and replaced the wall-to-wall carpeting in our then house. My wife did not understand why I kept rolls of this stuff in the garage, and even after I explained it she was not happy about it, but that's life!

Another possible twist, inspired by the cork hills on the Major General's classic site, is to paint the reverse side of the contours GREEN for use both individually as river banks and/or stacked into hills for more lush climates.