The French Dockyards 1944 - Preview

We are planning our next Boot Camp for Hawkcon on the 9 and 10 May. While pondering over the main board we saw another gamer had an interesting board with a U Boat or something similar as a centre piece. That got us thinking, so we searched for an appropriate boat.  Our first discovery? Boats are big.  Actually HUGE would be a better description. Getting most boats to scale would be larger than our standard Bolt Action 6' x 4' board. However, we were able to successfully use 1/72 scale gliders in our Pegasus Bridge game so we thought that would work here.

A little small but it'll do.

We discovered this Revell German Submarine Type IX C 1/72 Model Kit online and were enthused at our options.
At 1063mm long (42") this meant we would have to carefully work out the best way to place this on the board to get the most benefit.
Combining this with our city heights project (the planning and the result) was our solution, as you can see by the video above and the photos here.

Now we have a little work to do.

Add Boat Here

Firstly we need to add a couple of corner height sections, some beach areas and paint the foam.
Then we need a gantry to go across the boat and some walkways from the boat to the sides.
Lastly - or  firstly once the kit arrives this week - will be building and painting the whole point of this board - the submarine!

What else is there?
We then have the fun mission of working on the armies we will be using.

Naturally it will be 600 point forces, but we are considering a mix of Kreigsmarine and boat crew for the Germans and perhaps Americans, British or Commandos for the Allies.
We are considering setting this as a battle just after the Sword Beach landings in June 1944.
We'll see what response we get and how play testing goes.

More next week as we progress.

Our public playtest of this game will be at The Combat Company on Saturday 21 March.  We will also be having a second board on which we will be running our Boot Camp.

Let us know if you will be coming along.