Paul V's 1/72 scale Battlefield

Here's some ancient pics I managed to dredge up, Woodsy, showing the battlefield I once made. Not very large, sorry, they're scans I made ages ago from paper pics I've mislayed since... I should still have that field somewhere, with hills cut out and rest rolled up. :)

#1 shows construction: cheap wallpaper taped to floor of parent's living room while minding the house during said parent's holiday. Hills are filled with layers of stepped pieces of cardboard (from boxes collected at supermarket waste dump). Visible towards the rear are some game boards from Avalon Hill's Panzer Leader game, which I scaled up a bit (but nowhere to anything realistic).

Woods were made from styrofoam; houses are 4-5 basic buildings I drew up, photocopied and which we then coloured in with magic markers.

For rules we used the most basic ones from Panzer Leader. Having things in 3-D (as opposed to 2-D cardboard) means that things like "line of sight/line of fire" could easily be checked by eye instead of needing 2-3 pages of specific rules, and all the nonsense about troop morale was simplified to the morale of the players. :)  Unit strength &c we also got from the Panzer Leader game.

#2 shows a young P Vreede having set up the German side.

Reason I had some German troops is a good friend in college had a friend that staged massive battles and I wanted to participate. Friend's friend had a large Red Army, so to help my friend I made a reasonably self-contained (if unrealistically composed) German battle group. I never got to play with them for one reason or another, but it turned out handy when I discovered my best friend Lo (shown in #3) had enough American stuff to field against my little group. 

#4 shows my little Kampfgruppe, #5 and 6 are my rear/HQ area. Object of the game was to capture at least three enemy-held towns as well as the enemy HQ vehicle, which could be hidden. (you need an objective or else nothing much will happen).

#7 shows Lo's Task Force, posed for a patrol in #8. 

#9 - 11 are posed pictures of our troops.

#12 is from a real game (where so much was going on that we had to break up the normal turn system into individual little skirmish turns to manage the fighting and keep things both realistic and fair. :)  Red paper squares denote destroyed vehicles, orange means damaged for a turn. What we both lacked in equipment I quickly made out of paper: side and front silhouettes dovetailed together (also visible in last picture).

Et voilà.

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Paul

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Paul originally sent me this post in 2016! This week I found it again in the drafts list.