My descent into the tinyest of scales… and madness?

I’m currently part of the Battle of Warns, which was part of the Friso-Hollandic Wars between Count William IV of Holland and the Frisians, which took place on 26 September 1345. Historically, the Frisians won the battle and repelled the ‘Hollanders’ from the eastern coast of the Zuiderzee.

With my in-laws being Frisians and one of my ancestors having been a minister at the church of Warns around 1600, I felt that my place was clearly to stand with the world’s tallest people against Hollandic aggression!

You may have noticed from the images above that Tabletop Simulator is used by the umpires to keep track of these online games. Often players will also have access to their own instance of the map, so that they can keep track of what they know there. 

This is nice, but as a tabletop wargamer this is never going to be enough for me. 

So my idea was to pin a printout of the map to a cork board and keep track of the game with push pins on it. With me having a 3D printer, I thought I’d make simple gaming pieces for the different troops at my disposal. Since the size of my map printout wasn’t that large, I went for designs that had to be recognisable from a distance.

I went for simple bases, on which I put raised images I got from https://www.svgrepo.com/. 

Here you see both the designs, and the printed version, which I lightly coloured with a sponge. E is me; W is an allied commander. The dimensions of the melee troops are 7×5.5mm. Ranged are 10.5x4mm. The designs are, from top to bottom and left to right: empty tile, mounted knights, knights on foot, mounted men-at-arms, men-at-arms on foot, bowmen, crossbowmen, pikemen and spearmen. Not all of these are printed yet, since my part of the army unfortunately contains but few of the fancy troops…

This was not enough for my subconscious. So when the Hollanders came with their cogs (a medieval sail ship), I could have made a simple boat tile. But, I went and designed a cog in Tinkercad instead…

Now this definitely scratched my itch and thus I seem to have crossed the Rubicon…