Delving back into Deadzone

6th November 2022

This week I started into this project, making my first move on 2nd November.

As with Warcry, I decided to start out with the terrain. (I have some minis painted already, but plan to add more)

Most of my first edition scenery was still on sprues, so first things first – I needed to do something about that.

Taking over the table again I pulled out the sprues, plus the other boxes of terrain I have picked up over time, and the terrain from the 3rd edition starter set.

And so began the great snip-athon of 2022 ?

Interestingly, Mantic designed the sprue attachments in a clever way…..

The edges of each of the terrain tiles are angled (to allow them to butt up together in either orientation), and the sprue gates are onto one of those angled edges rather then on the very edge of the piece.

This means that by angling your snippers to match the angle of the edge you can get a very clean cut – someone in the sprue layout team was thinking as a gamer there!

After much snipping, and a sore back, the parts were finally free, to roam the streets of the many corporate cities…. Or sit on the table for now.

Next evening it was onto sanding down the edges.

The cuts were all pretty clean, but I still got it into my head that I needed to sand down all the edges – to be honest it likely wasn’t needed for these parts, but I ended up doing it anyway, as I would still know.

At this point I was still lacking concrete plans of how to build my terrain into a suitable set of scenery – I knew that I wanted to have at least two or three sections that were two cubes or more high, not have any buildings that were too large (and therefore would not allow models to be moved through or around effectively) and that I wanted to try to avoid having too many (as my friend puts it) ‘bus shelters’.

So, sanding things down and then making a note of how many of each part I had was a useful thing to do in my mind, to keep things moving and help with the soon to come planning stage.

In doing this I realised I only had three doors out of all these parts (a couple went to my friend for when he was building his terrain layout – which actually exists, and I saw it as better they were in use on a usable layout than sitting in a box).

I’ll have to come up with a solution to get around that.

Next up was taking the parts from my other boxes and laying them out as well, to get a full picture of what I have (and what I am lacking).

So, I cracked open the Military Compound box, and the rest of my 3rd ed starter box – and over the next couple of sessions I set about sanding down the edges and adding them to my organised piles.

Today,  realising that things weren’t progressing as quickly as I had hoped I found that I needed to make a temporary storage for the components.

I took the 1st ed box lid, and some old cardboard, and knocked up a quick organiser, so that the dining table could be usable again 🙂