Berlin or Bust

OK, the big story is my Berlin Project, I have started to gather bits and pieces for it, as you know patience is not one of my virtues. I have been watching YouTube for ideas on city ruins, most concentrate on such for Warhammer 40K, some of the processes will work with WWII buildings, so still worth a look. Quite a few are for terrain boards and I watched Luke, the punk guy, put together a large 6x4 from buildings he got cheap on eBay, a lot of effort went into the work and it looked good. I have decided against boards as I do not have the room to store them at the moment and also they involved a lot of faffing around with compounds, plaster, foam board, buckets of PVA glue etc. for Luke it was worth it, but not for me. So I am simply buying kits and painting them up while spreading debris and scatter around. I was impressed with the 4Ground Stalingrad kits which do not require painting, which is fine if you want pristine ruins but I didn't want to buy them then paint over them, I have not given up on this idea entirely for now but the bulk of the buildings will be the shell type. I looked around before settling on Terrains4Games (Poland), they do single buildings or bundles, I went for a bundle to give me a good start and also chose the ones with sidewalks, I suspect I will need to add a couple more to the bundle but I will wait to see them in the MDF so to speak. There is a fantastic scenic layout of Stalingrad on YouTube, it was originally in one of the wargame magazines, there is an industrial area which morphs into built up ruins at one end of the table, I am taking those ruins as inspiration for my build. These look very good but are not overly full of debris, so figures will manage to stand easily on each floor, my build has to be practical and mobile.

Because I am not going for terrain boards I need a mat, again I looked at several before settling on Pworks (Italy) city ruins, they have two mats, grey or sandstone, I was very tempted to go with sandstone but in the end bought grey, grey spray paint being easy to source was my main mover for this. I have also sourced loose bricks, chairs, mattresses and oil drums for scatter. I have my eye on a Rubicon pack which has street lights, signs and telegraph poles, having looked at old photographs of Berlin streets this set will do nicely, Sarissa also do a tram in MDF, a couple of them are on my list as well for street barricades, the Germans filled them up with rubble and they became excellent barriers. I may not fill mine with rubble but we will see.

I also now have my SYW figures but as usual I have cocked up the order, I somehow ended up with two limbers and only one horse, so I needed another, I also got two drummers instead of standard bearers, I really need a new APP, an Order Checker perhaps. I am fired up with the Berlin Project so may leave the battalions for a while, it will depend how much stuff I get delivered next week which goes to the front of the queue. What about Covid and the 'Traffic Lights', Medium, High and High Risk (what happened to Low?), below says it all for me.