Project Foy - Timeout Result

This past weekend I helped our junior terrain makers finish their school project. Their 6th grade Social Studies assignment was to re-create something from ancient Egypt. Many of the kids picked the obvious "pyramid made from sugar cubes" project, but my son came up with the idea of picking a famous battle from that time period and building a terrain board and rule set for it. He volunteered my help, but I wanted them to come up with the ideas and, more importantly, to do all of the work.

After digging around on Wikipedia for a while, they settled on the Battle of Pelusium in 525 BC. This was a battle for the fortress of Pharaoh Psametik III and took place in the eastern Nile delta. The boys did a great job of doing the research and deciding what the board needed to look like. I can't say that their idea for the fortress exactly matched the historical account, but we all make allowances in our projects to make them fit our time/space/budget.

The boys used a lot of the techniques we have already presented:

Honestly I was not sure what we would do for figures, but I was hoping to find a set of plastic Romans at least to pass off for Egyptian warriors. As luck would have it, our favorite hobby store, Greenfield News and Hobby, had not only Romans, but Egyptians too. We were also able to pick up some cheap palm trees to add character. They look a little cheesy: if we had had more time, I would have gotten the procedure that John uses to scratch build them and had the boys make them. Similarly, the boys ended up only having enough time to mark the bases of the figures to indicate what side they were on. I am hoping they will be interested enough to go back and take a stab at painting them up.

For the Nile River tributaries, I showed them how to blend a variety of colors going from darker to lighter as they moved out from the center. For such an advanced technique, I thought they did a very good job. I finished the river sections off by brushing on Liquid Water after the paint had dried. I just wanted a shiny top-coat. I was not going for the depth that we normally use for rivers and ponds. Overall, I was very pleased with the effort and result.

I did stumble across one new technique as we were trying new things. I found that a Burnt Umber wash over the spackling compound rough coat results in a pretty good river bank. In this case, you want to go easy on the sanding/smoothing.

If we can get it on the schedule, I am going to try and convince my son to run a full-fledged game at Little Wars in February. We play-tested their rules on Saturday night and it seemed to be a reasonable game. But, finally back to Project Foy!!