Land of Tales and Heroes

I've been playing Song of Blades and Heroes, a small skirmish game published by Ganesha Games, for a few years now on and off. It's a straight forward miniatures game, with simple enough rules to play through quickly, but with enough depth and interesting systems to remain engaging and enjoyable. It's a system that is easy to get into, and as a result, easy to manipulate. You can play games in any setting that inspires you, with any miniatures you have handy.

Like many gamers I seriously lack storage space, but being a fan of the smaller scale of miniatures is a bonus in this regard. My favourite scales for figures tend to be 15mm or smaller. For Song of Blades and Heroes I bought a range of 15mm Orcs and Goblins from Splintered Light (and they are wonderful models). The only thing lacking was a good playing surface.

Being small scale miniatures Song of Blades and Heroes only calls for a small sized board. In the shed I happened to have a 2ft by 2ft piece of MDF that had served me many moons ago as a DBA board. It was time to re-purpose the glaringly green gloss surface to something that looked a little better!

Previously the board had been coated with a horrid dark green gloss spray. The first thing I wanted to do was to add some texture to the surface, so I sprayed it with watered down PVA, and sprinkled sand across the surface. After this was dried I sprayed it with a black undercoat, then painted on successive layers of brown, culminating in several layers of drybrushing, from brown, to a very light skin tone.

To add some colour and interest to the surface I sprayed on some more PVA, and then added static grass to finish it off. Once I had shaken off the excess I sprayed the lot heavily with a matt varnish.

I'm pretty happy with the result, now I'm just waiting to get a game or two happening!

If you're interested in Song of Blades and Heroes - it's well worth checking out. At the moment Ganesha are running a Kickstarter for the Advanced rules and a Dwarf source book. I am very much looking forward to getting my copies!