Tools

Hobby Knife (such as X-acto) Extra Blades or Sharpening Stone. Blades must be kept sharp or the foamcore will tear. Steel Straightedge for cutting. The cork-backed steel rulers sold in art supply stores are ideal. The cork prevents slipping while cutting. Ball-headed sewing pins. Get pins with a glass or hard plastic head. The cheap pins with the soft plastic heads have a distressing habit of punching through the head and into your finger when they encounter resistance more solid than cloth. Tool for applying spackling paste. A fast-food plastic knife is adequate. A small painting-knife with a trowel-style head about 1" is ideal, but expensive. Templates(Optional) (click here for details on making templates) Medium artist's bristle paintbrush. A #6 or #8 Bristle Round is good. T-square and triangle OR a 2"-wide clear plastic gridded ruler.

Materials

3/16" Foamcore board Thin posterboard (sometimes called "railroad board") White glue (such as Elmer's) Water-based spackling paste such as acrylic or latex. (Solvent based spackle can dissolve the foam in the boards). Acrylic hobby paints (white, black, one or more shades of golden brown or ochre, and a medium brown) Balsa wood, 1/16" sheet. 1/8" dowel or twigs

Building a Native House
Here are step-by-step instructions for building a basic flat-roofed dried-mud native house. Similar houses exist in primitive areas all over the world, especially in the tropics. The same techniques are used for larger structures. All sizes given are for use with 25mm figures. Reduce or enlarge accordingly for other sizes. (If you are using 15mm figures, it may be better to use 1/8" foamcore board instead of 3/16". It is not as widely available--you will have to go to a well-stocked Art Supply store.)

Laying Out the Walls
Decide what size house you want; 2.25" to 2.5" square is a good minimum size. Use a basic wall-height of 1.75". Cut a piece of foamcore long enough to allow you to lay out all 4 walls in a line.

Draw out the four walls lightly with a sharp pencil, full width and touching. A t-square and triangle or a wide clear ruler with a printed grid (such as the "C-thru" brand), will help keep everything straight and square (which it NEEDS to be).

Draw in any cutout details (door and windows) and any decorative extensions on the top of the walls. The Layout Template can be used to speed up laying out and cutting of the walls and details.

Cut out the walls with a sharp hobby knife, using a steel straightedge or the Layout Template . Be sure to protect the table surface below -- a pad of old newspaper or magazines is good, if you change it frequently. Don't worry if some of the cuts go into the building wall -- they can be filled with spackling paste later.

Rabbeting the Corners
otherwise known as "the tricky bit"
On the BACK SIDES of the front and rear walls ONLY, make shallow vertical cuts exactly 3/16" in from the ends -- cut lightly with the knife held at a low angle to the work. First, cut through the back paper part of the foamcore, then cut the foam, but not hard enough to cut through the front paper. Put the length of the knife blade in the cut, and pull away the scrap piece, leaving only the front paper attached to the main wall. You can scrape away any stray bits of foam still clinging to the paper. Practice this on scrap foamcore a few times before doing it on your carefully laid-out walls.

Your side walls should now fit right into the rabbets on the front and rear walls, neatly hiding the foam edge. If you plan to make more than one or two buildings, it is worthwhile to build a Rabbeting Template.

Gluing the Walls
Start with the rear wall and a side wall. Run a bead of white glue down the foam end surface of the rear wall. Now do the same for the side wall, but this time wipe most of the glue off with a scrap of foamcore, so only a thin layer remains (too much glue on the side wall will cause the paper extension of the rear wall to wrinkle up). Now put the walls together, making sure they are square to one another, and run two Ball-headed Pins through the side wall and into the edge of the rear wall at two different angles to hold the walls while the glue is wet. Press the paper extension of the rear wall down onto the edge of the side wall, to assure a good bond.

Repeat for all four walls.

Placing the Roof
Before the walls have dried, measure the inside dimensions of the building shell, and cut the roof to fit, then bevel the roof corners (cut off the tip of the corner). Cut a smokehole or access hatch if you like. The roof can be foamcore, but thin posterboard is better, because it can be more easily recut to fit and it leaves more vertical room inside the building for figures or other items.

Test-fit the roof and trim until it fits within the walls without bowing up or down. If the roof is posterboard, glue a couple of scrap foamcore strips (the ones that came out of the wall rabbets are perfect) about 3/16" below the top of the side walls. Give these a moment to dry, then glue the roof onto them and run a bead of glue all around the roof-edge where it joins the walls, to fill any gaps and to keep the thin board from warping when it is painted.

Allow the entire structure to dry for an hour or two, and remove the pins.

Distressing and Filling Edges
With a sharp blade, gently shave parts of the corners and wall edges, unevenly, so the house will not look too sharp and mechanical for an adobe structure. Then use water-based spackling paste (from the hardware store) to fill in the raw foam edges on the upper walls, windows, etc. Place a dab of paste in each pinhole and wipe off to fill the hole.

If you like the effect, you can thin the paste slightly with water and, with a stiff bristle artist's brush, stipple (dab) it onto the wall surfaces here and there to create some roughness. Let this dry for an hour before painting.

Painting the Building
Use waterbase hobby paints. The acrylic craft paints (such as Ceramcoat or Apple Barrel brand) that come in the small clear squeeze-bottles are most convenient and very reasonably priced.

Get a disposable, non-absorbent mixing surface; a piece of aluminum foil with the edges curled up is adequate, a microwave-dinner plate is ideal. Pour out a puddle of white and a puddle of a light golden brown or brownish yellow, (use a color similar to the color of your table surface -- unless your table is green). Apple Barrel's Golden Mustard or Ceramcoat's Antique Gold are good choices.

Dip your brush directly into the white and then into the gold-brown at an angle. Stipple (dab) this mixture onto the sides of the walls near the base. Don't use a brushing motion--use a dabbing motion with the end (not side) of a medium-to-large, stiff bristle artist's brush. Work only one wall at a time. Rotate the brush to avoid repeating a pattern. Work in more white as you go up, mixing the wet colors right on the wall. Work fast, so the paint doesn't dry too before you finish. The result should be a medium version of your table color at the base of the wall, roughly and irregularly shading to lighter brown near the top of the wall. This technique gives the effect of texture, even if the wall is smooth.

An alternative method, easier, but not as effective, is to paint the entire building a light cream mixture of white and golden brown. Let dry, then stipple the walls lightly with a thinned golden brown, using a stiff bristle brush.

After the wall has dried you can paint cracks in the wall (usually from window or door corners) with a fine paintbrush. Do not use black -- it will be too strong. Use a medium brown, thinned slightly. If you have the artistic ability, you can paint areas where the dried mud surface has fallen away to expose mud bricks

Adding Details
Fine details will get easily broken during the handling of gaming buildings, so make any details sturdy. It is a mistake to over-detail gaming structures.

You can add a balsa door to the building, but this will keep you from putting figures inside to fire out the door opening, if that is your style of play. Paint balsa-wood sheet a medium brown and allow to dry. Drybrush grey over the brown. Scribe parallel grooves with a sharp pencil. Always paint before scribing. If you scribe first, the paint will swell the wood, erasing your grooves. Glue the door to the inside of the wall.

You can add wooden shutters to the inside or outside of the windows in the same way. Many tropical buildings have wooden privacy screens blocking the windows. You can simulate this by cutting the window, and pushing the waste piece back about half the wall thickness. Glue from behind and let dry. Then poke a regular series of holes in the waste piece. You can paint the screen a medium grey-brown for wood, or the same color as the wall.

You can add texture to the roof. Fibers, such as those cut from short lengths of twine can suggest a palm-frond roof. For a plank roof, you can make the roof of balsa sheet instead of posterboard, painted and scribed as for a door.

You can add exposed roof beams by poking holes in the front and rear walls, just below the roofline. Insert short lengths of brown-painted 1/8" dowel or twigs whose ends are whittled to a point.

You can add a balsa ladder up to the roof, or build balsa stairs along one side of the building. For the ladder, be sure to glue a posterboard ground-extension at the base of the wall to support and protect the ladder. See comments on stairs in the "Structure Philosophy" section below.

Many tropical buildings have sunshades or awnings. Poke two holes into the walls and insert balsa strips for braces. For a cloth awning, cut a rectangle of facial tissue and glue it to the braces, leaving slack for it to droop in the middle; let the ends hang down for a short distance. Let the glue dry. Then dampen the tissue with water and flow on grey paint. The paint will stiffen the tissue and make it droop like cloth. When the awning is dry, drybrush with lighter warm grey. For a slat awning, just cut thin strips of balsa or posterboard and glue them across the braces, leaving some space between the strips. Paint brown and drybrush grey. You can see examples on the Colonial Houses Page.

Structure Philosophy
In miniature gaming, structures should be as small as they can be without looking ridiculous. In Ouargistan, a small, flat-roofed native building will be as small as 2.25" square with a roof 1.5" off the ground. The difference between a 2.5" and a 3.5" building doesn't sound like much, but the 3.5" building will take up almost twice as much precious table area (if you don't believe it, do the math). With the 2.5" buildings, you can get a 5-building town in about the same space as a 3 building town with the larger size. You must exercise ruthless care to keep things to a minimum, or else you wind up with forts or villages that take up so much area that the troops don't have enough room to maneuver on the rest of the table.

In order to make the undersized buildings look larger, shrink the size of the details. Do not make a door that is realistically big enough for a sun-helmeted figure to walk through. The tops of the doors and windows should come just above a based figure's eyes and be proportionally thin. By adding a threshold block at the base of the door, the door height can remain the same, but the door looks even smaller. This makes the small building appear even roomier.

For the same reason, use the thinnest bases you can on your figures. That way you can reduce the height of the buildings without having the figures appear obviously too tall for them. This is also a reason to choose a smaller size figure (such as the Ral Parthas) over a larger one (even both may be advertised as '25mm').

Stairs are an exception. If you want figures to be able to stand on the stairs, make the steps unrealistically large, over half the width of your standard figure's base. This will require risers of over 1/4" in most cases (higher than a figure's knee). The toylike appearance is worth the tradeoff in utility; it has the extra advantage that the modeler has to cut only half as many time-consuming steps.

To the Major General, at least, a slightly toylike look to buildings is not objectionable. No matter how much "serious" gamers would like to deny it, part of the appeal of miniature wargaming for most players, is that it summons up a nostalgia for playing with childhood toy soldiers. There is nothing wrong with keeping that childlike sense of enjoyment alive.

If your gaming style accepts the convention of soldiers standing on the roofs of buildings, then think about your building sizes in terms of your figures' base sizes. Sometimes increasing a building's size only slightly will allow an extra row of soldiers to get onto the roof. In order to decrease the size of buildings (especially fort towers) needed to support a reasonably large number of figures, you might consider allowing figure bases to overlap when in buildings or boats, even though this is not usually allowed on the tabletop.

Think about flexibility in layout. Rather than build a two story structure, build a single story one and a smaller single-story building that fits just inside the larger's walls. That way you have the option of playing them as two buildings, or of stacking the smaller one on top of the larger for a two-story. You can put a ladder going to the door of the upper building, or just imagine that it is an extra-large window.

Movement and Combat in Buildings
It is easy to get involved with complex rules for fighting and moving within buildings. Generally, simpler is better, but different scenarios will have different requirements.

For small town-buildings, the Ouargistan group usually plays that if a figure can reach the door, he is "in" the building and magically appears on the roof, from which he can fire or fight. In forts or larger buildings, there may be a standard 1" movement penalty to go up one story at stairs or a ladder. All shots taken within a single building are at close-range regardless of measured range.

How much a building aids defense will vary with the scope of the game. For a game with many figures, attacking troops can just move to the building and melee the defenders normally, albeit with a combat bonus for the defenders. For a game with only a few figures, it may be worth adding rules detail -- how many men can attack/defend a door or window, how many attackers must be inside before a door becomes clear terrain for the rest of the attacking unit, angles of fire from windows, etc.

When writing rules for special situations, remember -- unless there is great benefit to doing it otherwise:

• Simpler is better than complicated.
• Faster is better than slower.
• Doing it the same way as something else is better than doing it differently from anything else.
• Heavily favoring the defender is more realistic, but leads to a longer, duller game than mildly favoring the defender.

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