Dust Tactics: 3D Board & Custom Terrain

I really enjoyed painting all of the models from the Dust Tactics: Core Revised Set.

I painted them over a relatively short period of time whilst I was living away from home, so I was something new and exciting to keep me sane whilst I was away from my family.

Being away from home so much, starting a new full time job and running two growing businesses was taking it's toll, so from a gaming perspective I needed something simple, quick to play and simply something different to hold my interest.

I played a few test games which we really enjoyed. Dust Tactics has quite a simple core rule set. It is essentially a grid based board game with miniatures and the rules, from my experience, are not really 'open to interpretation' in most cases. There are individual rules that are specific to certain models or troop types and as the game has grown so have they, so for me personally there's enough to keep me on my toes, but they are really not too complicated to slow play, or leave me confused after a busy day.

The best part is, as the rules a relatively simple, you can actually play a few reasonable sized games in a few hours. So if you're prepared and ready for it, in an afternoon or evening, you can actually play a whole 6 game campaign, something that the designers of the game do beautifully with the Dust Tactics Campaigns.

Like it often does, an idea hatched; How about a 3D play-set? Yeah I know, I've got a few on the go at the moment. Grid based, modular, easy to store, less likely to shift around that a paper mat and most of all, pretty. The images used for the campaign books are such an inspiration and I was confident I could do something I'd be pleased with. Here's a teaser. The eagle-eyed reader might also spot a few of the additional models I picked up and painted in the last 6 months.

Due to logistics, the project actually took a long time to work through (over 18 months), but the actual time spend on it was remarkably small. I just had to be very patient, as sometime I literally only got an hour or two a month.

The main boards are all done, I just need to work on completing of some of the terrain elements and some special boards so that the play-set can be used for almost every game in all of the campaign books.

I've taken pictures all the way through the process, so I'll pull together a series of 'How to' posts if that's of interest to anyone.

In place of the in-progress custom terrain elements I'm working on, I've used some papercraft terrain elements from Marcos from TopoSolitario.com. Well worth checking out as he's created some fantastic terrain elements for all sorts of modern and sci-fi themes.