Jersey Bars

I've been playing around making some jersey bars/barriers to add to the tabletop.

I know that there are a lot of companies that make them, and a lot are for a reasonable price, but shipping to New Zealand costs and arm and a leg so I decided to go about creating my own.

I'd read on LuckyJoes blog that he had made is own out of plaster of paris and an ice cube tray and figured that it was worth giving a go.

I had one of those flexible mould type trays which, whilst not giving an exact shape, was close enough to represent some type of barrier. I was able to pick up some cheap plaster of paris mixture from our local $2 store and set to work.

My initial attempt was with basic plaster of paris, which came out nice and white, however I had trouble painting them. 

The paint wouldn't stick and every time I picked up a barricade, what paint I could get on them would just flake off on my fingers.

So it was back to the drawing board, and on the second trial I decided to mix some grey paint into the plaster of paris mixture. However, I didn't get the consistency right and there ended up being a large amount of air bubbles in the mixture, and I didn't make sure the mixture covered the whole of the mould completely and so when it dried and came out, there were gaps and holes all the way through it.

Being a resourceful chap, I decided to use that to my advantage, and just damage them up a little to make it look as if they had been battered, shot at, crashed into etc. 

A line of high viz yellow on the top finishes the look and there you go:

They aren't accurate, but I think they do a job. I'll do some more which are in better shape and less damaged so we've got some choice depending on how dilapidated we want our terrain to be, but for the sake of a $2 bag of plaster, cheap poster paint and half an hour, I don't think they are too bad.

Scale comparing it to a Zombicide miniature.

Hope you like.

Cheers,

A Bag of Goodies (Part 2)

Sorry all, been pretty slack with my follow up post. 

Like anybody would, I went through the bag as soon as I got it home, but it took a while to find time to take the pictures for this post so apologies for that.

As I mentioned in my last post, I paid NZ$10 for a large bag of what looked like an airport themed play set of some kind, but even though the bag was big and see through, it wasn't entirely clear just what was usable.

Sifting through it, I've discarded about a quarter of the contents - mainly vehicles which are the wrong scale or items that have no practical use for a zombie game.

But without further ado, here are some pictures of what is usable...

This is about half of what is probably usable within the bag.

Here are some barricades, with a Zombicide zombie as a reference. Useful for street clutter if nothing else. I got about 20 of the grey ones and 10 of the yellow and black ones. We've come up with some rules for barricades in our game, so these will be perfect to try out for that purpose.

Hmm... Shiny. If I give these a repaint I think they can be useable as searchlights. I'm thinking an army outpost with these, sand bags and such coming under attack from a swarm of undead. Maybe some kind of night time mission where the undead are attracted to the lights and the survivors need to kill the switch... possibilities.

All manner of street debris - signs, lights and oil drums - some are perhaps a bit too big but I'm sure they are still usable. I'll take the stickers off the larger signs and use them for billboards and such, the satellite dishes could be used for objectives and digital sky dishes on the side of buildings etc. 

Some possibilities there I think.

These are obviously part of some kind of kit in which you can build an airport hanger. The scale is slightly off - but the plan is to remove the stickers and use them as some sort of small office spaces or add them to other buildings. No concrete plans as of yet, but there is some potential there I think.

All in all, for $10 I don't think I can really complain. No doubt most of this stuff will be absorbed into our scenery and I'll show you what I do with the various parts in the future.

As mentioned in my previous post - whilst the selection of 'modern' terrain is growing all the time, it is still quite expensive and it can never hurt to look in second hand shops to see what they are selling. It may need a bit of work, a repaint or cutting or filing, but toys and parts are more than usable for the purpose.

A Bag of Goodies (Part 1)

As most of us who are into post apocalypse gaming can attest to - getting terrain and street furniture can often be quite expensive. Whilst there is more choice now than ever before, I've found that it is still quite expensive to purchase modern scenery for our games.

Now I subscribe to the mantra that one mans trash is another mans treasure, and so a great source of potential bits and pieces can come from what others discard and throw away.

Like many places, here in Hamilton, there are a few second hand shops with toys for sale that others have donated, and our local rubbish tip also does something similar - they go through what has been thrown out, and have an area where they sell the things that are... well, sell-able...

It was whilst dumping a load of rubbish off at the tip this weekend that I had a look around and found this big bag of 'stuff' for $10...

Now this bag is big, and I instantly saw that there was at least some things inside that can be usable. It seems to all have an airport theme to the contents, and whilst some of the things, vehicles especially, don't seem to fit the 28mm scale we game with, I felt confident enough that there was something in the bag that was usable to make it worthwhile picking up for a tenner...

To give you an idea of the size of the bag, that is a Zombicide zombie placed next to it!!!

So, I'll open it up, sort through it and post up what I've found...