Some months ago someone asked me the best way to represent shell bursts on the tabletop. At the time I responded that there was no really good way of doing it. Some people use a puff of cotton wool, others painted material of similar type. However the thought lodged in the back of my mind and eventually fought its way to the front. As I do a lot of WW1 gaming, artillery bombardments are important. Too often they are passed off as 'oh this area here is where the shells are falling'....but the visual effect is lacking and an appreciation of its presence is not very obvious to the players. So I dragged out some war video footage and fast forwarded from place to place, so I could watch how a shell burst performs. From that I came to the conclusion, that part of the reason most tabletop methods don't really work, is because they are static, while a shell burst is a continually moving event, with the shape of it changing all the time. Indeed they very dynamics of it change from first burst, until dispersal of the smoke and dust. So I made up some shell bursts with some of the excellent white material you get in some Battlefront packaging. This can be painted and takes colour without disturbing shape, or going lumpy, as happens with cotton wool. It is very similar to the material used as heat proofing and in jackets etc. to keep the heat in. Having made up several and created some shapes from small to large, dispersed and condensed, I was still not satisfied. I even painted red and yellow at the base of some, but the effect was still not there. All the shells appeared to have landed at once. I therefore adjusted them so some were small, some were large, others were very thin, a few very dense. Next step was to acknowledge that it is not all smoke. The first impact is in fact a bright burst of yellow/white. So I made up some flat cardboard markers shaped rather like a small sunburst. These were painted bright yellow with white centre and white streaks shooting outward. Cut in half and glued on their flat edge, these produced a single dimension view and did add to something when mixed into the shell bursts I had already made. But it was still lacking. So the next step was to make up more 'half sunbursts' but with the protruding rays much larger and some reaching quite high. It was necessary to make them irregular as well, to give the right effect. These were painted bright yellow as well, but this time I painted on a burst at the bottom, using black, red, yellow and white. Red and yellow was used to paint the protruding rays, with the occasional white streak added in. Mixed with the others, these looked great, but still lacked something. So more viewing of real bursts showed me that bright and moving were going to be hard to reproduce with flat colour. Therefore I sprayed all the 'sunbursts' with gloss, so they would reflect light from around them and help to make them less static to the eye. The effect of mixing all the things I had done together, was much better. But there were still one or two things to do. I got hold of some of my 'smoke' material and painted it brown, like dust. Then I made up some shell craters from modelling clay and painted them to look fresh. I even put a few wisps of smoke in some of them. Now, for the effect of a barrage, I marked out the area where a bombardment was falling and intermixed a range of the markers I had made. While still not as good as I would like (that could only be achieved with real movement), I found that I had none the less, captured the dynamics of a barrage. Laid out on the table it looked pretty good and comments from other gamers showed they were impressed. Since then I've found that when used in a game, this produces a much different attitude from wargamers themselves. For a start, the appearance of the thing is dense, but with that mix of yellow, red, smoke and dust, looks pretty formidable. Therefore instead of rushing through the barrage area, as many gamers had previously done, I found people stopped short of it and showed no inclination to enter. Additionally it produced a natural block for vision and again, players seemed to accept it without question. No debate as to if they could see through it or not. Allowing that we scale everything in a wargame, we may well be firing one gun at a particular zone, but of course in reality quite a few shells would have been landing. Therefore doing up a mix of these effects is not unreasonable. So I have now built quite a range of these shell markers and when representing a bombardment I use them on table. The effects are to give the right look, not only of the dynamics of the barrage, but also the formidable appearance as well. Players seem to like it and it has the desired effect on them. I commend the idea to others to try out. Back to Frontline Vol. 2 Iss. 2 Table of Contents Back to Frontline List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2001 by Rolfe Hedges This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com