Colonial Games: Bungstarter Jungle and Veldt Scenery

Tabletop and Scenery Construction for
Bungstarter Station

The Tabletop
The table surface is light brown wrapping paper, crumpled and smoothed out. Green splotches are made with a piece of natural sponge dipped in thinned green acrylic paint.

If your paper ground cover is for a single game or a frequently used setup, you can make the green sponge-painting a darker, more solid green in the jungle areas.

The River
The river is made from several layers of tinted clear vinyl from a fabric store. The vinyl is sold by the yard from wide rolls and has a reflective surface.

The upper layer is the widest and is blue tinted. The second layer is narrower and green-tinted and the third layer is even narrower and also green-tinted. Do not cut too carefully; it's all right if the boundaries of the two green layers occasionally overlap and cross each other in an irregular way.

The vinyl layers naturally stick to one another, but wherever one vinyl layer starts to lift up from the others or from the table surface, a small piece of double-stick tape (sticky both sides) will tack it invisibly down.

The final effect is one of transparency and depth, and the shiny surface gives a liquid look.

A similar material is the tinted cellophane sold as gift wrap. The group used it in later battles and found it to be cheaper, easier to work with, and generally better for representing water in most cases.

Playmobil Acacia
Ral Partha 25mm natives shown for scale.

The Jungle
Creating a convincing jungle on the gaming table is a problem. Using carloads of model trees spread throughout the area makes it difficult to maneuver troops and is an invitation to chain reaction tree falls. It is also expensive and there never are enough trees to create the look of thick jungle canopy.

The Ouargistan group's solution is to outline the jungle area with small plant models (green lichen in this case). At the edge, a variety of palm trees are placed.

For the overhead canopy in the center, the group uses the large plastic acacia trees made by the German toy company Playmobil. David has had several of these for years, because they are so simply and beautifully designed. Normally they are too big for 25mm figures, but he knew if he waited long enough, there would be a practical use for them. Looking down from the players' point of view, the acacia-covered area looks like solid jungle.

The Playmobil acacias spread their leaves out over a large area, but have only a single tall trunk, leaving plenty of clear area down below to maneuver troops. The players can reach under from the edge of the table, or, if you file down the wide spot on the trunk's base plug, the whole tree can be lifted up and replaced without even disturbing the base. The trees also disassemble for easy storage.

Some of Playmobil's large, beautiful palm trees can also be seen functioning as canopy in some of the scenario pictures, but only because we didn't have enough acacias.

The Veldt
The veldt is just clear table surface with a few cork hills and a few tree models which represent groves of acacia or other dry-country trees.

These trees are easily made if you have a hot-glue gun or better still, a hot-glue pot. Get some dried Caspia plant from the 'dried herbals' section of the craft store. It is inexpensive and available in natural straw color and also dyed in several different shades of green. Choose a couple of shades that you like.

An effective quick tree can be made by simply cutting off several Caspia sprigs and gluing the stems together to form a trunk. With a little extra effort, you can glue the sprigs to a branching twig for a tree with more character.

These trees are very light and are stable when hot-glued to cardboard bases, or epoxied to fender-washers for those who prefer a heavy base.

They are surprisingly resilient, but still not as rugged as plastic trees, so handle them by their trunks.

The Native Villages
Two types of rapidly constructed native villages were used in the Bungstarter game.

The Ookaballakonga village was made from two sizes of cutesey miniature papier-mache birdhouses from the craft store (though they could almost as easily have been made from cardboard tubes and sheet). Cut the bottom off, if the house is too tall. Recut the doorways and cut down the excessive roof overhangs if necessary. If you like the idea, you can prop the huts up on short stilts made from dowels, bamboo skewers or balsa, and make ladders going up to the doorways.

The fast and attractive 'straw' covering for the huts is made from corn husks, sold as tamale wraps in the supermarket for an unbelievably low price. Those who do not live in Texas may have to go to a specialty food store in a Latino neighborhood to get these. Use the tapered ends of the wraps to cut the triangular sections to lay over the roof. Cut the roof sections a bit longer than the roof, and bend them down over the edge. You can use the wonderful cheap deckling scissors that craft stores now carry (or take multiple cuts with pinking shears) to give the roof pieces an irregular edge.

The Ooka village's palisade is made from bamboo shishkebab skewers from the grocery store. Cut them short and glue them to cardboard strip bases with a bit of model vegetation at the base. This can be lichen, or green sponge or pot-scrubber material or various other things. Detail fiends can thread pieces of thin twine between the skewers and glue them in place to simulate the rope or vine often used to strengthen open palisades.

The Ouazulu mud village is made from brown papier-mache eggs sold right next to the birdhouses at the craft store. Just cut the eggs in half, and cut a round doorway in the side. That's it.

African Animals
The African animals are all plastic toys. All, except the hippo and crocodile, are from two suspiciously similar sets, each set costing about US$1-2. One was in the toy megastore and one in the supermarket toy aisle. The lions and hippo are repainted and the gorillas just drybrushed. The hippo, originally a novelty eraser, was 'waterlined' with a razor saw and a couple of crocs will soon receive the same treatment.

Launches, Palm Trees, Buildings
Details on constructing these items can be found in the Ships and Boats, Scenery, and Structures sections of the Major General's site.

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