Prepping for Joy of Six

At the end of this month the Cold War Commanders are putting on Calais: Encounter on the St Omer Road using the TacWWII rules. 

I've created the game board by airbrushing the road network onto a suitably sized green cloth.  Although I've dusted on some yellows and paler greens to break up the overall colour, I decided it needed some of my field modules to give the proper Pas-de-Calais countryside look.

A shot from the first run-through of the game
with just a few fields

On Monday I decided to do another terrain test, with a larger number of fields present. This looked better but there's a strong sense of "these are terrain pieces sitting on a cloth" rather than actual countryside.

Then I was reminded of Al Seward's game at Ebor Lard a few years back and how he blended together individual terrain pieces to form a unified built-up area.

I decided to experiment with various flock and clump foliage recipes to disguise the boundaries of the terrain pieces. The starting position looked like this:

Here we see three field units butted up against each other and the edge of the table. They do rather stand out as separate pieces.

I've had some mixed brown flock stored in an old Lyle's Golden Syrup tin for years as well as a small amount of mixed green flock previously used on figure bases. I tried sprinkling them both into the gaps between fields.

Okay but not quite what I want. How about using tiny pieces of torn-up clump foliage?

Possibly better but this isn't Normandy; I didn't want to give the impression of hedge-lined fields.

In the end I settled upon a mix of all three:

and made up a batch that can travel to Joy of Six and be sprinkled into the joints and probably around the boundaries of terrain pieces on the day.

Here's the full table with all but one of the villages in place:

And here's the village after a couple of hours' painting and matching base shapes to the previously painted road network:

I'm now more happy with the look of the battlefield but I think I may experiment with adding brighter green verges to the sides of the roads outside the villages. That'll help them stand out better. As some of the pictures above show, they tend to disappear in certain lighting conditions.