Last year I ran a sixteen article series on Making Mine Scenery , but it revolved around fully modeled 8"x10" board sections. This idea pre-dated my decision to switch to 8"x8" board game tiles, similar to games like Zombicide. These newer game tiles were still based on my original designs, but going square just made them more flexible to use and easier to design. However, that isn't the only drive behind revisiting Making Mine Scenery.  A more recent incarnation of the board game tiles with their 3D equivalents. In the last year, roll out game mats have taken the wargaming world by storm. Yeah, they started to make an impact a few years ago, but now they are everywhere and they are incredibly varied. A lot of the early ones didn't make me go, "WOW!" But Guerrilla Miniature Games Widgets and Wonders series on Youtube and their weekly programming of battle reports using these mats has showed me it was time to present another way of...

Greetings! If you're a first time visitor or someone who's been following the series, thank you for reading. My apologies to anyone who came looking on Sunday for the latest scenery post and found none. It was a busy and stressful weekend so I fell off schedule. That being said, we're back on track with our Sun/Wed schedule, so here it goes. As might be expected, this one is very picture heavy.    This is where we left off with the freight elevator car in Making Mine Scenery X . As promised, I worked on detailing it out. Today we'll add some additional rails/bumpers, signage, and the elevator control box which is where we are going to start.   The sunlight was so strong you can't see the hole I drilled, but I had cut a piece of StripeStyrene tube about 3/16" (about the width of 3 pieces of 1/16" rod, pictured next to it. The idea was to create a lever by gluing the rod in the hole I drilled. Here's a shot of the rod gluing in ...

Things have come a long way since early play testing! When I made my very first board sections for play testing a year ago, one of the only sections I had created that wasn't just a tunnel, was the freight elevator. I envision the mines having multiple ways out, some being more convenient than others. One would be to walk all the way out using winding tunnels, and likely encounter Prods and work gangs along the way. An extremely inconvenient way would be to try and escape out of the air shafts, because there has to be a way to circulate air deep down into the mines so that the workers don't asphyxiate. A common thing in mines though is to dig a vertical shaft using a hoist and then eventually install a freight elevator to move heavy equipment down, and move ore back out. One of the more consistently used dramatic action movie sequences involves "the elevator." The moments of waiting. The surprise of what might be behind the automated doors. Elevators are excitin...

Greetings terrain builders! On this Valentine's Day weekend I'm going with a quick and simple project: rock piles. Rock piles are a thematic addition to the mine setting and can be extremely useful for game play as barriers and cover to hide behind. Plus, they're a great way to reduce your terrain making "waste." First I began with some offcuts, a few 25mm round bases, and my breakaway blade. Personally, I hate waste. I try to get the most out of everything I can. Our hobby isn't exactly the most environmentally sound hobby out there so I try to reduce my impact by using most of my off cuts for other projects. I maintain a bin of off cuts of various sizes and most of the terrain made in this series has all been made from pieces in that bin saved from previous scenery projects. I cut up and shaped the offcuts into rocks of various sizes and shapes using the same techniques I did for the mine walls detailed in Making Mine Scenery Part II . I...