Bushido

I decided to loosely base the board on a visit I made to the Meiji Shrine in Tokyo combined with some of the other buildings and Shrines I saw on my trip, so I knew I needed a Torri  (the gate), a Sake offering and a Temizuya (Hand Washing)

So the start was to print out the structures I had sourced.

So I decided to go with a traditional (ish) black and red colour scheme for the more religious artefacts.  You can’t see it but there is ‘water’ in the Temizuya using tinted 3D printer resin.  Interesting effect is it appears to have ripples after using a UV torch cure it.

As the resin I was using was  clear, I painted the back of the ‘paper’ walls in white ink which gives a translucent effect – the cross pieces where simple black Sharpie, although I slipped in places and you can’t clean it off.  I mounted the house on a piece of XPS foam textured to give it a stone appearance.

So basically that is the terrain pieces built and painted and it is on the the board.  Bushido is played on a 2 foot by 2 foot.  I had previously purchased some 1 foot square pieces of 3mm plywood from Amazon and had some large expanded polystyrene sheets from some furniture deliveries.  I used PVA to glue the foam to the board and left it a couple of days before cutting the foam to size.  I wasn’t looking for much variation in height on the board and decided to simply have one embankment that would run along one side of a road, so used some scrap foam to block out this.  I then used some of Geek Gaming Scenics Modelling compound to smooth this into a more realistic embankment.  The final element of the stage was to paint some watered down all purpose filler over everything to protect the foam (just add a bit of water to the pot of filler and stir to give a thick paint consistancy).

The traditional logic when building a gaming board is to ensure that the edges match to give one coherent board, no mater how you lay it out.  However for this board I wanted 4 distinct areas, which I could always create new ones for in the future.

So my choice here was:

The Shrine  – this would be a gravel square bordered by grass, very plain, very neat.

The Road – this would be a straight section of gravel road, flanked on one side by a grass embankment and a plain grass verge on the other.

The Path – a winding path through a grassy area, probably an area where bamboo grows.

The Wild – an open piece of scrub land that could be used for anything.