Sun, Sea, Sand & Gaming

Over the years I've played the odd seaborne landing or two, either for WWII or my AVBCW milieu, but I've never gotten around to actually making the sea and beach to go with the actions. Instead I've fudged it with the sea just off the table, ditto the beach itself. I have pondered making some bespoke terrain boards to be used, but as they would require quite a bit of time and effort, talk less of storing them, the project never got further than the odd sketch.

So last week whilst SWMBO was out with friends, a Geek Villain newsletter popped up into my inbox saying they had all their mats back in stock. So with not much else going on, as it had been a hectic day, I did a quick browse of their products and noticed their Normandy Beach mat was available, ditto the Juno one. Whilst the latter is more to scale for my 10mm games, I found it too dark visually, preferring the brighter and sandier Normandy one. 

A few clicks later and I'd bought a mat, not something I had intended to do at all! However I have wanted to have some 'proper' terrain as mentioned above, plus the mat can be used for the Pacific landings (OK I know the sand might be more volcanic!), Burma and anything else from Ancients onwards.

The mat duly arrived today and after tidying a game away (more on that in another post), i unpacked it to take a few quick shots that can be seen below.

The mat on my 4' x 4' table. 

With it roughly divided into thirds of sea, sand and land, it looks really good to me. The beach is technically way too deep for my BKCII games, but that doesn't bother me at all.

A few items dropped on to give an idea of scale. The house bases are 3"/75mm square.

It does give some nice sense of space for the vehicles etc to cross the beach, rather than being clustered together as happened on D-Day.

The cloth is not too far off my Summer Field one, should I ever need to combine the two.

Well I'm very happy with my purchase and like the other mat, is so easy to fold away and store, even in my bijou games room! Even though it is a fleece cover, the sea doesn't look out of place not being glossy and in fact I really didn't notice it as being 'wrong'.

I think that now I have this it will push me towards finishing my WWII British additions that I started on ages ago for my Assault troops, as well as landing craft etc. I would like to get the odd battleship or cruiser to sit offshore, just to aid the visual impression of the game. It has also got me thinking of some say AWI or ACW actions, combining both sea and land operations, especially as the Glory Hallelujah! supplement has some rules for riverine actions.

Thanks for checking in and for leaving a comment too, as they are greatly appreciated!

TTFN.