"ACW Terrain: 10 Easy Steps?" Topic

Imagine that a newbie ACW gamer in a far-off location has asked you what he could collect or built for his battlefield. All he has now is a plain tabletop and green sheet. He wants to add one new terrain or scenic before each battle in his next campaign.

What would you recommend he needs for ACW gaming? Try to be specific – if a road, what type? how long? if a field – wheatfield? cornfield?

fenceing. lots of fenceing. and trees.
snake rails. post and rails. alot of low stone fences. the low ones the farmers used to make as they cleared their fields.

Lots of trees, lots of fences, a fair number of roads, a few rivers and bridges and a few low ridges

Battle 1: woods, as much as they can afford.
Battle 2: Fencing, as much as they can afford
Battle 3 Road, enough to make a crossroads in the center of the table
Battle 4: Stream, enough to run the length of the table.
Battle 5: Hills 3 or 4 about the size to hold one unit in line to two units in line.
Battle 6: Stone Bridge
Battle 7: Crops, corn or wheat or both.

For the newbie, especially one with a very limited budget, a trip to a place like JoAnn Fabrics is the ticket.

Buy a yard each of blue cloth, black cloth & brown/tan cloth. These get cut into strips to become streams, paved roads & dirt roads. Flexible and easy to work with.

Then buy some 8X10 pieces of craft felt. Dark green, dark brown, etc, for to make fields and shrubbery, etc.

You can make all the fences you need with a little time, and not a lot of money. Toothpicks for wooden fences, popsicle/craft sticks turned on edge and glued to another one, painted grey, make excellent started rock/stone fences. Paint them red-brown for brick ones.

Hills can best be made by either placing books under the green table covering, or by using scraps of expanded insulation foam. I was able to get more than I needed by stopping by a couple of construction sites and asking for scraps that they were gonna throw away. One site manager, when I told him what i was using them for, pointed to a huge dumpster filled with them and told me to help mself. So I did.

Houses can be made from breakfast cereal boxes. The Games Workshop site used to have a whole tutorial on how to make houses.buildings/etc from scrap cardboard around your house. Great tips like peeling apart layers of corrugated cardboard and using the ridged layer for tile roofs.

It isn't rocket science, and scratch building your own stuff is certainly labour-intensive, but you can build quite a lot of stuff for not a lot of money.

Well, as a newbie, I would excuse my friend for using the acronym "ACW" to designate the War of Northern Aggression, WNA.

After that, starting with a green sheet and wanting to run a battle after adding one terrain piece (and progressing from there), I would say you need a river. A river with enough sections to cross the board the long way, with enough curves to do a hairpin turn, and a ford or two. The river should be wide enough to take the a minimal penalty when shooting across it. From the river, you can imply muddy, clear, and wooded terrain at specific distances from the bank. This should give enough breadth to run one of a few battles reasonably (as reasonably as possible with one piece of terrain). If I could cheat a bit, I would say that a bridge is part of a river terrain piece.

If not, the second piece would definitely be a bridge. A two-wagonlane wide bridge that splits into thirds along its length so you can combine the two outer sides (the ones with guardrails) to make a one-lane bridge with an unrailed pedestrian foot bridge left over. This gives you four configurations (a single-lane, a pedestrian, a single-land and a pedestrian, and the big bridge). Hard pressed, you could use the bridges as surrogates for palisades or other defensive structures.

Next I would go for a farm building set. At least a reasonable cabin, a barn, and a couple of outbuildings.

I think the next improvement would be enough flat one wagon wide dirt roads to cross the length and breadth of the board at the same time, cut in some reasonable length sections.

Following along, a set of split rail fences to cross the length and breadth of the board.

Then maybe another set of small, cabinlike buildings.

OK, ok. Trees. Up to this point, you can suffer by defining the tree line as x" from the river, road, farmstead, etc. But it's nice to have actual trees on the board if you can.

That's seven. After that, I think it's time to start deciding on those specialty pieces that make-or-break for the specific battles my friend is interested in.

What Chris said, but I'll reinforce the trees. Too often gamer's don't have enough woods on ACW battlefields.

Okay, this is shameless…..but I would recommend a Cigar Box Battle Mat. After that, I agree with most of the statements above!

What ACW Gamer recommends.
I just looked at the Cigar box mat. For someone starting out, this is perfect. Not too expensive and you can roll it out and begin.
Remember this is a newbie. How long would it take to reconstruct what Cigar Box offers? Months of building trees,
rivers, fencing on and on. This way your newbie can actually play a few games and decide if he wishes to stick with the period or not. If he does, then he can build terrain while continuing to play on this mat.
And once he builds his own terrain boards, he can sell the Cigar Box Mat here on TMP.

By the way, I have no interest in Cigar Box and this is actually the first time I have seen the company's products.

If you are playing in 6mm/10mm and 15mm you can make buildings using wooden toy blocks for kids.

I also use a lot of 2d Terrain, using pastel crayons on good quality paper. It is not as great as 3d terrain ,but it does enliven the battlefield.

Another recommendation for CBB mats for the newbie.

link

Also, tell the newbie to check out this site:

link

A GREAT site for inspiration!

1. Trees
2. More trees
3. Still more trees
4. Repeat.

The CBB Battle Mats are outstanding – I have one, and will be buying another soon. I can't recommend them enough.

ACW – you mean the War to Liberate My Mother's Family (WLMMF)?
As a newbie he wouldn't know that.

Isn't it the GSR, the "Great Slaver's Rebellion?"

In addition to Trees, Walls, and Fences, you'll want to break of the uniform ground with Lichen and Foliage Clusters, Rocks (real or cast resin), and other accents and dressing pieces (like bags, crates, barrels, etc. around houses.

Fencing – nothing makes it look ACW like split rail fncing. Make it yourself out of toothpicks/matchsticks. Keep making it (whenever I think I have enough I am wrong…)

Mark yarn "pompon" trees, they are cheap and in mass look fabulous, mount them on washers with a roofing nail, gorilla glue the bastard to the nail. Paint trunk and base, they are light and indestructible, and…… You can make an assortment of spring/summer colors as well as fall. I have about 100 for my 6x4. For crimean war I only need about half of that. And fences, crap load of rail fences.

etotheipi
The official records call it the War of the Rebellion. There was no Northern agression until Federal installations were fired on.

I attended the West Point of the South where I learned that VMI won the Civil War. If you can't believe a Virginian who can you believe?

As far as the OP's question. TREES lots of them but you want to have some variety in the battlefield and as the majority of the populace was agrarian I would add snake fencing and some fields and a farm house/barn. Many battles were fought near water because troops and horses must drink so streams/river with a bridge. Much of this can be cheaply made as suggested above.

Yep, WotR.

If he's going down the 25/28 mm road like I did, lots of time and patience (unless he has deep pockets to buy everything finished). I have invested countless hours on terrain such as trees, fences (lots of plank & rail and snake), stone walls (w and w/o riders), fields (must have at least one decent-size cornfield – I made mine up of 40x80mm pieces and made about 50 pieces. Yes big and versatile but lots of time). Most of what is needed is relatively cheap at places like Hobby Lobby, Michaels, and Home Depot/Lowes if he has time and feels creative enough to do much of it. Like many of the other posters suggested – tons of fencing/walls and trees and a few roads and streams.

I make my own terrain out of my printer. I compose the terrain on my computer with a Corel Draw Program and print it on Avery full sheet shipping labels. These take the print well and have peel-off adhesive backs. These place on foam core and cut out one side. Then I put on the other side (made by simply flipping the image) and adhering it. I paint over the white edge with the matching color and it looks like real 3D terrain. I do hills, houses, stone walls, sunken roads and those staples of the Civil War Battlefield The Wheatfield, Cornfield, and peach orchard. I also do the Cabbage patch, the briar patch, and a host of other terrain pieces. These are all made to be KDF (knocked down flat) for compact storage.

I did this after I bought my American Civil War figures from Eindcatcher Graphics, the "Wooden" two -dimensional figures, which are so well printed that when you put them on the table they look three dimensional.

Carried on the style. Houses are made by the "egg-crate method) that is two sheets with notches to put together in a cruciform pattern. These go into slots on the base and they both look like houses and allow troops to be put inside the base thus showing who is in the house and who is not.

Works great.

OSchmidt…I would like to know more…got any pictures?

Dear ACW Gamer

Sure, just send me your snail-mail (postal delivery address) at sigurd@eclipse.net and I will not only send you a disk of the pictures, but I'll print out a few dozen sheets of he terrain so you can see how I did it.

I could sent you the electronic files to use but you have to have Version 11 or higher of Corel Draw. HOWEVER! you should be able to hack through it by scanning the sheets I send, and then putting them into a word or word perfect document and then print them out on your own.

If you think you could do that, I will also convert the corel draw files to JPEG format so you don't have to go through the folderol of scanning.

Give me about two weeks though. I'm swamped with printing stuff people have asked for from TMP and which I horribly behind on because my wife is still recovering from an in-and out and back in again stays at the hospital.

Dollar Tree has the evergreen christmas trees out 2 for $1.00 USD FYI. Good time to load up on cheap trees.