Ben's D-Day Project

My kids are homeschooled, and my wife Michelle does a fantastic job with the vast majority of the work with them.  Occasionally, though, I get the chance to do some fun school stuff with them.

For the past few weeks, my kids have been working on Word War II project presentations.  The plan was for each of our boys to prepare and present a project on a particular aspect of World War II that they would present to another homeschooling family.  Their family would also prepare projects to present to us.

My son Benjamin (4th Grade) decided that he wanted to do a presentation on D-Day that included a Heroscape model of the invasion on Omaha Beach.

I downloaded some pictures of Omaha Beach including this one for some visual perspective on the landscape:

And this one gave us another perspective on the landscape of Omaha Beach, but also gave us some perspective on the Allied invasion plan and the German defenses.

We decided that the whole beach would be beyond our capacity to build, so we focused on one section of the beach.  We build the section identified in the Allied plan as "Easy Red" and included the edge of "Fox Green" so that we could incorporate the fortification near the edge of "Easy Red".

With a handful of images at our disposal, we set out to make the best representation of the coast of Normandy that we could.  We started with the beach itself then adding the water on one side and the first level of grass on the other.



Then we built up the cliff on the one side of the board and the slope up the other side with a ravine in between the two trying to make the board appear as much as possible like our source images.  When the board was finished it looked like this:

Add a bunch of Airborne Elite and a few Sgt. Drake Alexanders (both ROTV and SOTM) in a handful of overturned 7-hex concrete tiles, and you have an Allied invasion force.

Add a few squads of 10th Regiment of Foot (because when you don't have any Nazi figures, you make do with what you've got, regardless of the historical reality) in the German bunkers, and you've got yourself a great D-Day presentation Heroscape Board.

Benjamin also wanted to add a few trees to the board despite there not being any at all in our source images.  We call it creative license.

I wanted to include Benjamin's presentation in this blog, too, not so much because of its connection to Heroscape, which is minimal, but because I'm a proud father sharing the good work of his son.

This is some of the fun and educational stuff you get to do (with Heroscape) when you homeschool.

Happy Heroscaping.

Valkyrie Shrines - Jandar

Life, it seems, has not slowed up one bit since Christmas has passed.  Meetings for one thing or another and planning for the new year seem to take almost all of my time.  I have a few moments this week, though, to update my blog with a new entry.

I was trying to think about what I could put up that wouldn't take too much time to work up.  We haven't played again since the day after Christmas.  My son has the table and a lot of terrain pieces tied up with a school project which I will post about later on, after he's given his presentation.  Then it occurred to me that I could put up stuff about the Valkyrie shrines I've made.

I encountered the idea of Valkyrie shrines a long time ago on ebay.  I liked the idea, and thought that I could do something on my own similiar to what I'd seen.  I got some clay and started working on a Jandar shrine.  I also got a few colored stones (one for each Valkyrie) that I thought would work great as the power source for the shrines.

My first attempts were okay, but not really great.  I tried etching the Jandar symbol into the clay and then painting it, but I'm not as got with creating desgins by hand.  I much prefer the digital medium.  Anyway, it didn't turn out too well, so like any good desinger, I tried again.

What I finally came up with was to use chunks of stryofoam as icy formations around a central monument.  I looks good and it functions well.

 

There were four design constraints that I put on myself.
  1) I wanted to use a figure, if possible, in the shrine.
  2) The stones would be the power center of the shrines.
  3) The shrines would fit on a 7-hex tile (or its equivalent).
  4) There would be one open space for each shrine.

The Jandar Shrine has an original Raelin in statue form on the top of the monument.  The bars were white fences from one of those Department 54 accessory packages.  I made the top piece of the mounment from some scrap wood in the garage.  All of it, of course, painted gray, so that it has the appearance of metal.

Each Shrine's Army Card has two sides.  One side is the Shrine side.  The Shrines are placed on the battlefield by the creator (almost always me) as a part of the battlefield and any scenario that we may be playing.

The Power of the Valkyrie was designed to make the Valkyrie Shrine work in conjunction with the Valkyrie Dice, so we had another use for the dice, other than the flag bearers.

The other side is a variation of a Shrine.

Like the Shrine, the Battle of Frozen Souls Memorial aids any Jandar figures on the board.  The frozen souls are "frosted" Tarn Viking Warriors and MacDirk Warriors (any three will do).

Whichever player calls them into battle from the Frozen Souls Memorial receives two squads of  Frozen Warriors, but you only get one shot at it per game, so get there fast and make that d-20 roll count. 

The Jandar Shrine was the first one I did, but not the last.  Next time I'll put up the Ullar Shrine.

Happy Heroscaping.