Cork Hills

(Corunna, inexplicably sideways and resisting all attempts to turn it)

The hills of Cork....

...which are as nothing compared to the bewildering and irrational behaviour of their rivers, which seem to conceived solely with the purpose of upsetting innocent Dubliners.

The last few days have been very eventful and I can't say that I'm unhappy to see the back of them, they have however left precious little time for wargaming or indeed sleep.

Bob Cordery over at Wargames Miscellany has been experimenting with foamcore for use as hills in his portable wargames project. I have had some success with using cork for the various Command & Colours games. You can see above the Corunna scenario laid out using my 2mm figures, woods and buildings and using some of the river tiles from the game.

As you can see the look isn't too bad and I've found the cork a very durable and hard wearing material to work with. I've traced a card hex from the boxed game onto a cork tile and then cut the resulting shape out with a sharp craft knife. Sticking a couple of hexes together allows you to make larger hills, though after experiments with bespoke hills, I found that it was generally easier to produce a variety of shapes of between one and four hexes in size and put them together as needed.

Donogh has commented that the 2mm figures are swallowed up by the board. I can't say I mind myself, but I can see his point and have been looking over the options offered by Irregular Miniatures. They offer blocks of troops up to 96 men strong, which might be a little too big for the hexes, but would certainly make it easier for the uninitiated to manipulate them.

There is of course, the option of placing the figures on larger bases and using a marker system, but this would miss the point of using figures in the first place.

Oh and by the way, one of those clever Johnnies over at ccnapoleonics.net have come up with another Corunna scenario, this one using the Breakthrough format. You can find it here.