Kira's Club Terrain - A Spring Clean Challenge

My Pledge for Week 4: Monday 22nd April 2024 – Sunday 28th April 2024

This weeks pledge will continue to be a broad one: get as many pieces for the City Ruins set cleaned of sprue gates and mould lines in preparation for the eventual painting that is coming.

However, as I work through these there is a something I want to be thinking about and I’d like to get a few more pieces ready so that I can start to play around the idea.

Once all of the wall pieces have been married up with both their column pieces at one end and these little caps at the other, they end up with a series of holes.
As you can see in this photo of me ham-fistedly holding an example of incomplete parts together, these create a recess for pegs that will keep the piece together when assembled into a building.

One of the options advertised when this set came out was the option to use magnets in place of these pegs for a quicker snap-to/pop-apart experience. On the surface, this sounds like a great idea. With the intention of these being used at our local gaming club: the faster the setup and the tear down, the more time for playing during club time. There is a but, however:

There are these decorative elements that can be inserted into the recesses in place of pegs where one is not being used to connect two pieces of wall when setting up the terrain that can add some flair.

Some of these are little things like pipe ends and lamps, some of them seem a little more chunky and structural. Memory has failed me and I cannot recall if any of these offer anything more than just pure decoration however and vanity pictures on Archon’s website are a little light on all the different possible options as to what all of these could be.

What I want to do, sooner rather than later, is get some of these cleaned up and looked at to decide if any of them are worth wanting to leave access to the peg recesses to make use of.
If there are any worth wanting to incorporate into the set, could they also use magnets somehow? If so, how much extra work might this be? Adding the magnets would be a nice touch for use at the club but leaving a substantial part of the kit unusable as a result would be sad.
Conversely, giving up that convenience for a few twiddly bits that people might not even be inclined to bother going around a plugging in with the constraints of a club night with a closing time would be a poor execution on what this work is meant to achieve.

If I can get enough pieces from each related pile cleaned up enough to maybe dry fit things together or sub in some blutack for the time being, I can start to get a sense of which side I might want to come down on.
Whether I get that far in the next seven days remains to be seen but it means I might, for example, pick up some of these twiddly bits next after finishing the walls instead of say… the walls toppers for the time being.

As an idle curiosity: I keep track of these bits of work through a service called Trello. This is a bit of a hold over from work where Jira, another product by Trello’s owning company Atlassian is effectively the defacto tool for tracking pieces of work that need doing and where they are up to in the world of software development.
Trello is like the much simpler version of this with a version that is free with a limited number of boards so I started using it some years ago to track of what pieces of projects are up to where.

Whilst these groups of pieces can vary a fair bit from almost singular pieces to piles of dozens of fiddly pieces, I can at least get a sense of what is outstanding to complete a step for a given project.
As you can see, having filtered my board down to just the Rampart – City Ruins stuff, there is plenty more for me to be getting on with.

As usual, I shall be back in about a week with an update.

Depending on how far I can get with “enough stuff to see if I want to magnetise” line of thinking it might be a more in-depth analysis of my results or it might just be a “got more done, still working” with maybe a screenshot of my updated Trello board.

Whilst I do want to keep blogging this process as it keeps me focuses on progressing each week, I am also aware that several weeks of “here’s a pile of grey plastic that I have cleaned and here’s a pile I haven’t” isn’t going to make for the most exciting content and padding it out the sake of making the blog look like there is more going on is likely to make for uninteresting reading.
Over the next few weeks of churning through these pieces, I may opt for more short and sweet check-ins unless some noteworthy eventuality is reached.

Either way: Until then.