First Founding: The Big Build Evening

Welcome back to the Vault my fellow Venturers!  Tonight's post combines two topics close to my hobby heart; terrain and the First Founding Games Club.

Our club is very lucky to have on site storage space for our gaming boards and terrain, and a load of scenery for our 40K tables (as you will see).  However a lot of the pieces are starting to suffer from their years of long service and the cramped conditions of the storage cupboard.  So a call to arms was issued to the 40K community and a number of the regulars gladly exchanged their armies and games for an evening of sorting, gluing and painting as part of our first Big Build.

First up, we pulled all the terrain from the cupboard. There was more than we realised:

You can see a reason why our terrain suffers; over full boxes with no lids. These all get stacked on each other!  This was an easy problem to remedy with (a) the arrival of a number of shiny new storage boxes with lids and (b) getting rid of a load of the rubbish and un-savable bits.

So job #2; sort the terrain into 3 piles. Pile 1, good enough "as is":

  

Pile 2, stuff in need of repair, re-basing or re-building:

And Pile 3, Beyond Repair. No picture of this one, but we scrapped several boxes of broken items (having first taking anything worth saving to reuse as part of updating Pile 2).

People dived in and started fixing up buildings, bases and so on. I took on the role of party Druid and set about sorting the forest and jungle terrain. I started on the stage:

Then moved to a table:

Side note 1, I might have "lost" the low hedges; no more fighting over Farmer Maggot's allotment in the Grim Dark Future.

And then another table!

I also managed to sort a box of broken trees and brand new aquarium plants, along with another dozen or so painted wooden bases. There's a good project for someone if they fancy it (may be I should work on a terrain set for Ghost Archipelago some time)

Next up was fixing a GW ruin; fixing broken pieces to the base, adding some scatter and tidying up the paint work. I have to confess to getting rather involved at this point and I forgot to take pictures. I was pretty pleased with the end result, and it joined the growing pile of finished pieces that the other guys had been working on.

Side note 2; we've filled a load of gaps (windows, doors, etc.) to provide more LOS blocking. God bless 8th ed terrain rules.

There was plenty of banter going on with the hard labour; how good will the new Gene Stealer Cult be on the table top (very), how am I getting on with Deathwatch (not great, black is a PITA to paint), painting tips and tricks (never dry brush with a wet brush),  

I reckon the Big Build was pretty successful:

• we've got a whole bunch of refreshed terrain
• the organisation of the scenery cupboard is much improved
• it was a good social event for the club; everyone was willing to get involved

We've still got plenty more to do; some of the guys have taken pieces home to paint and there's plenty of enthusiasm for Big Build 2: The Ruin Strikes Back. If you are a member of a club or similar gaming group, I'd heartily recommend a group scenery hobby session like this; it's loads of fun and the whole community gets to benefit from it. 

Side note 3; I've got some personal hobby stuff done as well. I've been painting Primaris Marines (obligatory post to be written when they are finished), and I've dived into Kill Team Arena. Here's some WIP terrain on a much smaller scale:

KT Arena terrain is built to specific layouts for the various missions; I felt the addition of some simple plasticard bases would add a bit more strength and stability to them.  Looking forward to getting some paint on them and trying the expansion out. I'll post a report once I've given the set a spin. 

As always thanks for taking the time to stop by the Vault; hopefully the Primaris Marines will be done for the next post!