Minas Tirith Me Up: Osgiliath/Minas Tirith Terrain Project, Part I

Good morning gamers,

When COVID hit, Lachlan Linton-Keane from Zorpazorp started a gargantuan project (his forte, if we're honest) to create a scale wargaming model of Minas Tirith and have members of his community share in the building of walls, buildings, and siege towers for a massive battle for Minas Tirith when COVID restrictions were removed. As part of that effort, he released templates for walls and buildings of various kinds, and with the help of others, has available for purchase in his web store STL files for siege towers and siege rafts. It's a good time to be a Middle-Earth fan with guys like Lachie around.

Photo Credit: Sott.net
Make no mistake - our endgame is not as grande as Lachie's . . .

I've been looking to build a Minas Tirith-themed board for a long time and when the templates first came out, I swept them up and started planning. With Gondor at War giving us a bunch of scenarios in Osgiliath and Minas Tirith (and some of those being required for Fantasy Fellowships in Quest of the Ringbearer), I wanted my board to be able to work as an Osgiliath board, a Minas Tirith board, and be able to accommodate any scenario from either of these books. And while it's taken me nearly two years to get started, there's been a LOT of planning that is finally coming together. Let's dig in and start building!

Prepping for the Minas Tirith Buildings

Lachie's templates are made from paper - and while I could print out a bunch of sheets of paper and tape them down to whatever I cut these out of, I wanted more durable templates, so I instead laid them out on cereal boxes and started cutting with a knife (scissors for clean-up). I got five buildings out of most of two cereal boxes, as you can see below:

Building #6 - a very tall building that will abut the walls of the city

Building #1 is a mult-tiered tower

Building #4 is really thin

Building #2 has some funky window panels

Building #3, roof and some wall accents only

Building #3 - the rest of it

I made a prototype of one of these with my daughter out of cardboard (Building #2 - she's using it for a schoolhouse) and it came out surprisingly well. Like my Bree board, I'm looking for compact storage, but unlike the Bree board, I want my buildings to be smaller and based off the templates, so I'll be looking into magnetic strips and tabs or Velcro straps to bind them together (still figuring that out - more on that in a future post). 

For those who are curious why I use cardboard instead of foamboard, the primary driver is that my kids like to use my terrain - and they're not gentle (despite constant reminders). Replacing something I made out of cardboard is much easier than replacing something made of something else, so I'll update these someday - but it is not this day. :-)

Board Planning and Initial Construction

As with most of my boards, I started with a mock-up on my computer - the goal was to chop up a half-inch-thick, 4' x 8' sheet of polystyrene into the following 1' x 2' chunks:

4' high and 8' across - all to be 0.5" thick

 

On the left-hand side are six panels to be used for the Minas Tirith streets - the blocks on those panels represent the rough idea of where the buildings will be placed. I ended up being a bit more flexible with them as you'll see below, but the idea was to have a variety of orientations so we can mix the city up. A few need to have a clear corner so that we can accommodate a fountain in the center of an open area for one of the scenarios in Gondor at War.

At the bottom-right are two panels that have a strip of light-grey and a strip of dark-grey (one with a mid-range-grey as well) - these two panels will begin as city streets that lead up to a second level (because it's Minas Tirith after all). Most of the remaining chunks of foam from this board will be used to raise the second level and to make the ramp up to it.

At the top-right are two panels with blue and two panels with green - the blue tiles will be river/water tiles that lead into the city (for use in Pelagir, Osgiliath, and Harlond missions), while the green panels will be the city gates with massive walls on them. All of the other panels you see will be used to raise the second level of the city.

Roll out!

Then began the task of measuring and chopping 1' x 2' sections of polystyrene - I started with six of them and started using a GreenStuffWorld textured roller (pavement) that I borrowed from Rythbyrt to imprint a stonework texture on the panel (which you can kind of see below):

Textured rollers are fun to use - unless you're two years old, in which case, you squish your fingers a bunch . . .

I then chopped up the other tiles and ended up with the following - six tiles in the middle that will be city streets and that have had a textured roller rolled all over them, two tiles on the left that have been marked out to be the multi-leveled tiles, and three tiles on the right to be the walls of the city and the gatehouse:

The 5' x 4' board for Minas Tirith - if you look closely, you can see the planned locations for the buildings I will be constructing . . .

Conclusion

The water tiles haven't been shown here - we'll walk through those in a later update, but so begins a project that I've been looking forward to doing for a LONG time. I'm looking forward to printing a few siege rafts, some siege towers, building the walls/buildings, and playing through some of the scenarios (as well as Matched Play games) to see how the city works out. The city is unlikely to be as packed as Lachie's board, but it should have enough terrain to make things interesting. Until next time, happy hobbying!