Rising Tides and Turning Tables

Shortly after moving to our house in 1987, I set up my wargames table. It was supported by 2 Ping pong tables, and on top of that sat multiple frames made of 2x4's, and topped with 3/4" plywood, painted blue for naval battles and as the base layer for GeoHex. The total table was 20 feet long by 6 feet wide. Ove the years it became evident that I never used more than 12 feet of the length, and that the 6 foot width was becoming more challenging to reach across as well. Finally, a few years back, one of the tables tubular legs bent and had to be repaired with duct tape! Thus, almost a year ago, I purchased four 2.5 by 6 foot tables to replace the aging structure. Those tables sat folded up in the garage, as in order to install them in the basement, first the immense pile of clutter on the far end had to be sorted and moved, and then the very heavy components had to be removed from the basement to make room for the new; a two man job at minimum. Thus nothing happened... until 2 weeks ago. That Saturday morning we awoke to find a good inch of water in the basement following some heavy rains. Now, we haven't had anywhere near that much water (usually 1/8" at most in a portion of the basement with really heavy rain) since we installed a sump pump following a real flood of about 3 inches of water. 

Well, it turned out the old pump had burned out. That lead to about 6 hours of pumping water out of the basement while a new sump pump was installed. We had already started clearing out unused items form the basement the week before, and thus I took advantage of the opportunity to have Louis,  the guy who was helping us, assist me with hauling the old table out and bringing the new tables down. 

 

The result - a new, smaller but much lighter, more mobile, and flatter tabletop!

Doing all that took the better part of the weekend; consuming the time I had mentally assigned to getting everything finalized for the 3rd and biggest of the three games that I ran at HAVOC outside of Boston, MA, this past weekend. I planned to leave bright and early Saturday AM (6:30), so that I could arrive at the convention hotel before 9 AM. My schedule then included playing in my freind Mark's "Concord Bridge North"  1775 AWI game at 9AM, setting up running, and taking down my Battle of White Plains October 1776 game at 2:30, taking it down,  and setting up for my Punic Wars Battle of Geronium game for 7:30 PM, and then running 2 Napoleonic scenarios from Neil Thomas' One Hour Wargames using Square Eagles at 10:00 AM on Sunday. Needless to say, I was happy to have the nerw tables installed and the old ones removed, but that placed a real crimp on the planning and packing needed for less than a week following. 

Here's the terrain set up for White Plains laid out on the new table

That's the Bronx River. which flows into the Hudson river, which is just a little ways off the left of the picture. The marshy ground supposedly accounts for the Indian name of the area, translated as :"White Plains", because of the frequent mists arising therefrom. 

The buildings represent the village of White Plains. Like new England, the ground in New York is full of rocks left by the Glaciers during previous ice ages, and thus stone walls are everywhere; they had to have place to put all the damned rocks encountered when trying to farm the land. These walls are cast resin I had acquired perhaps 10 years ago and started but never really finished; those were finished in the 5 days after the flooding. 

With this battle taking place in October, I wanted a bunch of trees with fall foliage; These are from a 14 tree pre-made Woodlands Scenics Fall Forrest I received a week or so before the show. They still had to be based, the trunks dry brushed, the bases flocked, and I then added a second contrasting flock color to all of them suing loose flock and sprayed scenic adhesive. 

OK, let's add the troops! The key position of Chatterton Hill is in the foreground

View from the White Plains side; the British (and Hessians) are to the left, and the Patriots to the Right. 

This battle is why all of the AWI troops have been leaping off the painting table (and the planned Battle of Brandywine, 1777, for Historicon in July). 

Patriots behind a line of stone walls. They tried to dig entrenchments, but the rocky ground made it very difficult to do with any speed. 

The Hessian command is in the foreground; they played a key role in the historical battle. 

Chatterton Hill, with a few Patriot Reinforcements off in the distance. 

A pretty typical New England stone wall, probably 150+year old, on the back of our property and dividing our yard from our neighbor's. Nothing fancy, a pile of rocks, about knee high. Most of our neighbors' properties have a similar old wall on it somewhere!