Monopoly Buildings

I worked on an unusual project this week for a friend, John Drye. He is planning on hosting a large wargame event this summer at the Historicon, the largest historical miniatures war-game convention in the world. To put this in perspective, it's like the NMRA National Convention, though Historicon typically gets about twice as many registrants as the NMRA National.  I used to attend Historicon regularly in the 1990s. John Hill, Dean West and I used to host massive Johnny Reb games at this event. The largest game we hosted involved 60 players over two days. If you think about it, that's one game with about half the participation of a typical Prorail event. There are hundreds of such events, though most not as big as that one, at Historicon.

Several of my friends are or were affiliated with Historicon management.  This year, I am planning on going to Historicon, but not the NMRA National. I am helping my friend prepare his scenery for the game since I really enjoy doing scenery. I am also doing some play testing for his scenario, which is based on Operation Market Garden. He plans to cover the whole campaign including the airdrops and the British 30 Corps race to the Rhine at Arnhem. This is the famous, "Bridge too Far" battle.

Unit counters are 2 inches square

His game system he plans to use is called "Breakthrough." It was written by Frank Chadwick, a very well known, prolific game designer. John is one of the official play testers for the game system. The game is very high level. Each counter or stand in the game represents a battalion or about 1,000 men or 50 armored fighting vehicles. Each inch of game ground equals 500 yards of actual terrain. The stands have 1/285 scale miniatures mounted on them, but not in a  one for one ratio of actual vehicles. For example, the 559th Schwere Jagerpanzer Abtielung, (559th Heavy Tank Destroyer Battalion), which had about 40 assault guns, has two vehicles mounted on a two inch base. See the photo at the right. The game plays very much like a typical board game but with miniature figures and scenery.

Nijmegan with 15mm (1/100scale) Miniatures

The game includes combat in Built-Up areas, i.e. towns and cities. These areas are depicted in the game with 3 inch square templates that are gray colored. Buildings might be scattered about the gray templates, but they need to be removable so that the 2 inch square unit counters can fit inside. The photo at the right shows how they were doing this with larger miniatures, but still using the 2 inch bases.  This was a game that I helped play test.

This way of modeling towns in a miniatures game was  off-putting to me. One of the fun aspects of a miniatures wargaming is the spectacle of seeing models on terrain. Some folks could care less and play mostly for the games sake. They use a simple green cloth and put the models on them without hesitation. In model railroading, we have folks like that too. But I prefer the terrain to look as good as the figures the play on them.

So I tried to develop a way to model the city of Nijmegan that will be playable in this game system and still look  like a European city in WW2.  The requirements were - develop a model of the city of Nijmegan on a 3 inch grid, and decorate it with model buildings in such a way that 2 inch unit counters could fit.

First, I got copies 1/25000 scale maps of the area during WW2 from the US Library of Congress. One thing that is obvious in comparing  these maps to satellite images from Google earth is how much more urbanized Holland and Belguim are now compared to then. Of course the same is true of the US. I adapted the topo maps to the grid that game uses. In consulting with John and using the maps for reference, we decided that Nijmegan should be one grid of dense urban and six adjacent grids of suburban terrain.

Town grid and a typical unit for comparison 

I made a drawing of the street grid that is a much simplified version of the actual road network. The scale is somewhere between the actual ground scale and the scale of the miniatures used in the game. Thus buildings are about 0.25 wide  by 0.5 inches long. They look like the little buildings from the Monopoly game, with a little more detail. Each three inch grid has a removable 2 inch insert. When the town is unoccupied by units, it looks like a model town. When units occupy the town, the unit counters replace the inserts. There are now less buildings in the town, but it still looks like an urban area.

When units move out, the town inserts are placed back in the town grid.

This gives you an idea of the overall size of the models

There were two important bridges in Nijmegan, the highway bridge and the railroad bridge. These are also modeled in a representative way. They can be removed if they are destroyed during game progress.  Though the city grid shows rail lines, they don't have impact on play except at the bridges.

It remains to be seen if this concept for representing cities works out. If it does, then I will make additional cities for Arnhem, Eindhoven and Veghel. If not, we can have some neat games of Monopoly.