"How Tall Are Your Trees?" Topic

I like tall trees on my table top whenever possible. Trees commonly range in heights up to 300' but our game trees rarely exceed a few inches.

So just for grins and giggles, here is a quick chart showing how tall trees should be, if we are matching trees to figures:

I use Woodland Scenics mostly with heights ranging from a tall of 8 inches down to tiny 1-2 inchers. I thought the tallest ones were seeming too tall, but according to your chart, they are not enough.

Do you actually keep ten types per scale in your terrain storage? On Planet Piepenbrink, trees come in two types--"pine" and "deciduous." ("Palm/fern" is under consideration, but only in the context of a dino hunt.)

Visually for massed battle, I find that 2-5 times figure height is sufficient, but I suspect if I did more skirmish/RPG I'd need to get closer to true scale. Of course, that would be true of buildings as well.

Mine are 3-4" tall but I'm planning on a few bigger. I thought about how they are kind of scrubby even compared to the relatively small trees that grow here. After doing a bit of thinking about real scale I decided they look good enough and don't interfere with the soldiers.

And, if you are matching trees to the ground scale, that's a whole nuther story.

I have trees from 2" up to 8" but I game only in 6mm and 15mm.

For 1/144t scale evergreens, I'm using 4" – 6" ones, mostly, right now.

I have some larger ones, with snow on them, I've used in the past too. I suspect those are in the 6" – 8" range.

They pull duty in multiple scales.

I somehow think that 72" tall trees might clutter the table somewhat.

It is problematic if you can't reach over the trees to move your figures.

Using 1/72nd scale figures with a ground scale that is generally 1 inch equals 50 yards, a six inch tall tree is 300 feet tall. I think I am okay.

Mike Bunkermeister Creek
Bunker Talk blog

Skirmish games with smaller ground scale, I use relatively taller trees.

Big unit game with larger ground scale, I use relatively smaller trees.

Tonight, I was just basing some palm trees to use for DBA. Big ground scale, so I cut the trunks down considerably to a height that a camel and rider could just pass underneath.

I had a bunch of tall trees that I wasn't using, and I gave them to a friend many years ago.

Lately, my trees have been getting taller, but they are all alien species growing on other planets, so I don't have to be concerned about matching them to model or ground scale. I just try to make the table visually appealing and make sure that there is room for players' hands to pick up figures and move them. Trees are mostly 2-4 inches tall.

My buildings tend to be pretty big. They're probably somewhere between ground scale and figure scale. I'm playing with 25mm figures, in a game where 1 inch represents 10 meters of ground. My buildings range in size from shoeboxes to the boxes in which business cards are delivered.

I have some three inch coniferous trees. For 28mm Viking games set in Iceland, I have trees 1 to 2 inches tall. By the time the Vikings had been in Iceland for 50 years or so, most of the tall, old growth timber was gone, and you were left with something resembling the scrub oak in my backyard. or pirate and Darkest Africa games, I use cake store palms that are about four inches (102 mm) high.

Grelber

One of our group usually manages to get two or three trees stuck to his sweater, even when we are using small trees. He would probably end up completely camouflaged if we were using accurate scale trees.

EC, those are maximum heights ? Most real-life trees will be smaller than that, starting from seed-size !

Most are 20cm (8") but I do have larger and smaller the largest are 30cm (1')

x42

For my 28mm games my trees and forest pieces are about 6"-8" but some are taller in the case of some of my pine trees are just slightly taller.

Think of the height of GW's Citadel woods kit. That to me is what deciduous 28mm trees should be in size. Or Woodland Scenics 6" deciduous trees.

For me it's important to mix in different sizes, but here is the key:

If you use ALL HO scale trees it won't look right with a 28mm battle, not unless you are fighting in a place where all the trees are actually meant to be that puny. But it still doesn't look right. There's something that is just "off" when all your trees are like 3" and the miniatures are next to them. To me it's kind of like plunking down an aquarium rock onto a tabletop without any kind of conversion or repainting. It's all about visual sense. Some things that are out of scale you can use in 28mm, but others create a distortion where you feel like you have something on the table that just doesn't belong there.

Kind of like using fully-sized plastic flowers for a jungle in 40k. Yes, technically there could be a species of jungle plant that has flowers that big in a fantasy world, but it still creates a sense that they are out of scale with what you are doing, if that makes sense.

For example, you can use like the 3" deciduous or 3" pine to represent very young trees in 28mm, but not as the fully grown trees. Putting those 3" trees next to the taller ones help to create the feel of various stages of growth going on. Therefore a 3" tree that might typically be used in a smaller scale of wargaming could be a very young, still partly bush-size tree in 28mm.

But in my opinion, your forest pieces and individual trees should be a heavy majority of the taller trees, at least 5"-6" with some scattered through that are slightly taller.

3-5 inches which seems to look OK with 15mm

Big trees for me are 3.5" to 4.5" tall. Small trees are 1"-1.5" tall.

Small trees are for 15mm and smaller and large trees are for my skirmish games in 1/72 and 28mm.