January is coming up fast, and I have been doing a lot of prep work for the Northwoods Grand Tournament. I won't be playing in this one. I'm running it.
Because this is a two-day grand tournament, I need to be able to set up twelve tables of terrain. This means that I will need a lot of trees, hills, buildings, and other scenery. Back in October I asked my friend Rick, the owner of Adventure Games Plus, if he could keep an eye out for used wargames terrain collections. Rick frequents trade shows and swap meets and he finds the weirdest most obscure things.
He did not disappoint. When I stopped by his shop in late November he had three big boxes of terrain for me. They were trees, shrubs, and buildings from a huge diorama which was formerly displayed at a military museum. The collection was exactly what I needed! He got it for cheap and he sold it to me for cheap. Rick is a great guy!
Most of the trees were in good condition, but a few needed repairs. The bigger problem was that these trees were from a static display diorama and were not balanced very well. A lot of them were quite tippy. Enlisting the help of my pet rats, I was able to put together an assembly line to widen the bases of the trees using 50mm plastic discs or custom cut pieces of card. I didn't let the rats use the hot glue gun, but they sure were cute in their tiny little hard hats. Noodle and Dale kept trying to steal the reindeer moss foliage from the branches, though, so they were sent back upstairs.
I had lots of trees and shrubs now, but I needed flat bases to show the borders of the difficult terrain on the game tables. I took a trip to the dollar store to look for inspiration. They had cheap carpet doormats with rubber backing. They were perfect. All I would have to do was cut them into the shapes I wanted. While I was there, I picked up some of the little plastic Christmas Village buildings to further supplement the terrain collection.
The last thing I was going to need was table mats. I own one very nice neoprene battle mat. It was $80.00 though, and I couldn't afford to buy eleven more of those! I was trying to figure out if I should just buy some green bed sheets to use as table cloths when I stumbled across an advertisment for a sign company that made 6x4 foot vinyl banners. Coincidently, that is the exact regulation size for a tournament battlemat. This company, The Best of Signs, will happily print any image you upload onto a 6x4 vinyl sheet for CHEAP. I did a quick google search for satellite images of grassy fields, uploaded them, and ordered two banners as an experiment. They turned out perfect, so on Black Friday I used a coupon code and ordered six more with three different patterns including an alternate field, rocky badlands, and a frozen lake. Each of them cost me roughly twenty dollars. The eight vinyl mats plus my one neoprene mat put me at nine out of the twelve I needed, and my clubmates volunteered to provide the rest from their own collections.
Things are coming along nicely in preparation for the big tournament!
Our club received sad news recently. One of our members is moving away. His wife's job has reassigned her to Salt Lake City, Utah. It is short notice, and he is scrambling to sell their house in Wisconsin and pack up all their belongings in just one month. Once the move is complete, he has to find a new job himself. He works in healthcare, so he should be able to land on his feet. It's a very stressful situation to be going through during the holiday season, regardless.
Mike is one of the original members of our gaming club. He is the first person I ever played Kings of War with after I got back into miniature wargaming a few years ago. I'm going to miss him. He's one of the friendliest and most approachable people I have ever met. He isn't especially competitive. He just loves painting minis, pushing them around on a table, and enjoying pizza and beer with his friends. He doesn't care who wins. He's a joy to be around. The Salt Lake City gaming community will be blessed to have him in 2025.
I visited Mike this weekend because I wanted to make sure I got to see him before he moves. I don't suppose he's going to make it out to any of our club meetups in the next month or so, given his current situation. We went out for lunch at a local sports pub, had some delicious Nashville chicken poutine, and watched a little bit of the Army Navy game. I helped him move a big recliner up from his basement. Mike has a lot of miniatures. During Covid lockdown, he painted over a thousand of them. He is in fact, the most prolific painter I have ever met.
Mike has generously donated his beautifully painted Elf and Ogre armies to the club to sell in a silent charity auction at the Northwoods GT this January. The proceeds will go to the Wisconsin Humane Society.
He also gave me his small collection of Rats, which I will treasure always.
As a society, we think of moving away as a problem that primarily affects children. It is something which has likely affected all of us at one point in our young lives whether we were the ones moving, or whether it was a good friend who moved away. When I was a kid, it certainly affected me. It was a problem out of my control, though. It was a problem that was in the hands of the adults. Surely once I was an adult, I could make sure that it didn't happen anymore.
Then I grew up and joined the military. So much for that theory. Moving is hard on us no matter what age we are. It is also often out of our control, regardless of how old we are. Kids are told not to worry, because they will "just make new friends". That sounds callous. It sounds dismissive. As someone who got moved around by the military, though, it's actually true. When you move to a new place you make new friends. You really do.
The important part to remember though, is that these are not replacement friends. You didn't lose your old friends. They are still your friends even though you live far away. You are just gaining new friends. It's not a swap. It's a gain. The more people you meet in life, the more friends you make. And your old friends are still your friends, regardless of where you live.
Technology like social media has made the world a much smaller place. We don't have to wait weeks for letters to go through the mail. I might not be able to physically shake his hand after a battle or hug my friend in the parking lot of the game store anymore, but that doesn't mean that we can't share internet memes and laugh together. We will stay connected, and I am confident that his new friends in Utah will show him the same brotherly love that our club has.
The Kings of War Wisconsin club is richer for having known Mike, and I know he feels the same about us.
If you have a friend in your life that you don't get to see in person anymore, send them a meme every now and then, just to let them know that you are thinking of them.
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