Past Practice

For the 2008 and 2009 D-Day recreations, the main constraint was the table space available. We could manage two flat tables each about 6' x 8'. The actual coastline of Normandy has the beach rising to seawalls in front of the towns, and then the ground inland slopes gradually upwards. On a flat table without much potential for elevation, I designed the beach boards, then a seawall-and-slope overlay piece - but this meant the countryside sloped downwards from the seawall. This gave a seawall to attack over, but everything inland had the elevation inverted. And the overlays were simply painted insulating foam with no texture or attention to aesthetics - not exactly throwaways but not made to last or be very appealing.


Planning for the 2010 game set three goals:

1. to have terrain suitable for a presentation game we could re-run at later events,
   
2. to deal with the beach and seawall elevation issue, and
3. to try to capture the Juno landings more accurately, rather than using a generic beachfront.

Howie from our group prepared a sketch map of the ground, and Stuart raised the question of having higher ground south of the beaches. I knew I wanted to build the boards from high-density insulating foam on hardboard backing to make the boards more resilient. I didn't know how large I wanted the boards to be - only that the full table would be 12' x 6' (2' of beach depth to the seawall, and 4' of table depth behind that) with Bernieres and Courseulles as the anchors for the two ends. I also felt the boards should be somewhat modular so they could be recombined for other games. So I struggled with whether to have 4' x 4', 2' x 2', 4' x 2' or even 1'x 1' boards. Manevuring pieces of hardboard around a store convinced me 4x2 was the most manageable in terms of weight and getting around corners, through doors and into our car, so that settled the size issue. The foam (either pink or blue) is available in 2' x 8' sheets, so a straight cut would make two terrains boards from one sheet.

Step 1 then was to attach the foam sheets to the hardboard with PVA glue.