Our house, in the middle of our street

This week has been another case of "Real Life stopped play" as I got called on for family duty Monday & Tuesday (and again tomorrow in fact). I did manage to finally get the MDF boards cut for the slum project bases - so I now have four roughly 60cm square base boards which need to be covered in cobblestone wallpaper, and a number of bases for the individual buildings and pavements, which will sit on top of the baseboards. I also found time to pave and paint one base to offer it up to the prototype building.

I've done the pavement with individual squares of thin card - a little time consuming but not too bad. I am however chickening out of paving the back yard areas, which strictly ought to be done in the same way. I'm in two minds whether to just give it a rough black painted texture, a printed pavement texture (like the brick paper) or just use another piece of cobblestone wallpaper.

I've also been stripping the paint off the two GW Leman Russ tanks that I picked up cheap at Britcon. The hideous arctic paintjob is proving difficult to remove, although it's now about 90% clean. The glued-in sponson guns have however defied all efforts to loosen them, so it looks like I'm going to have to try to hacksaw the weapons out without doing too much more damage to the sponson frame. I'm waiting for an order of tridlins from Ramshackle Games with the parts I'll need to steampunk these, as well as planned conversions of the Grendel Iron Drake and Ramshackle's own Brass Coffin.

Finally thanks to everyone for the positive feedback on the GASLIGHT tutorial posts. I hope they continue to prove useful to newcomers. As became clear, even I had a couple of things to learn about the revised rules from the Compendium. A more useful lesson I've learned from the exercise is that even though GASLIGHT isn't designed for small table games, even my modest 3x4 coffee table can host an enjoyable, half decent GASLIGHT game. I played the tutorial with the official "one unit, one vehicle, one unattached MC" recommended per player, but the action was really confined to about a third of the table. Although GASLIGHT vehicles can potentially move across a large portion of the table in a single turn, they are limited by their poor manouverability and the terrain. I think I could quite happily manage a game with double the forces involved in the tutorial, which is starting to turn into a decent sized wargame. That's definitely something I want to try, if I can ever make the time.