Gorram's Gotham

After writing up some notes for myself and beginning to make plans for the table, I realised that I have a lot of questions about it that I don’t have answers to and there’s a lot of room for expensive mistakes. Rather than do my usual and rush in anyway, I decided to make a scale model.

The starting questions I want to answer:

1. What is the best size of table for what I have and want to achieve?
2. Do I have enough buildings?
3. How wide do I want the roads to be?
4. How about the pavements?

I have a six MDF kits from TT Combat that I’ve had for a while that will be perfect for this one. Getting the dimensions online for each kit was easy except for the largest of them. The Bank seem to be a discontinued kit so I had to open the kit and measure the base board size. The height is an estimation but it is mainly the footprints which matter for this exercise.

Once I had the dimensions, I just divided them all by 10 and started making some little paper templates. I used some thick paper so they were a little bit robust. It didn’t take more than 40 minutes to make them all.

I used foam board for the table sizes. First I made one scaled to 3ftx3ft and one for 2ft 4″x2ft 4″. The first is because that is the recommended size for Pulp Alley and the second because I already have an MDF board cut to that size that was for another project.

Then worked out the scale for a road that was 6″ wide.

After having a play around with different layouts, I decided the small table was really too small. 3ftx3ft is good however I looked up the cost of getting a new board.

Wow, nope.

I can’t afford that.

So back to the drawing board. I have three 2ftx4ft boards that I used to turn my dining table into a full size wargaming table. So maybe a 4ft table? Another piece of foam board cut out, and the playing continues. 4ft will need more buildings/objects to get proper coverage but I think that is preferable to the MDF.

Pavements I’ll come back to because it will tie into another element of the table but the scale model did help me make decisions about that too.

On the whole the scale model, while not necessary for every project, really helped me here. There’s quite a lot of extra skills I’ll need to pick up for the final table and so getting more of a handle on the basics before wasting money has felt good.