Totally not abandoned project

 I bet you had forgotten about my mining town vertical board. I can't blame you, it's been nearly two years since my last installment. Shame on me!!

The good news is that I'm finally back to work!

A brief reminder of the last pic published:

As of December 2020

The next stages will be necesarily slow ("Even more than now?" I hear you scream). There is a lot of planning involved now, as I need to fit in a lot of elements, and space is beginning to be scarce for all the stuff I want to stick in here.

So well, one step at a time. First thing, I needed to take care of the left end of the board. It's the part that will usually be down when the board is storaged in the cupboard, and so it will be taking quite a share of the weight. Mere foamboard structures seemed too fragile, so I needed something sturdier. Fortunately I had these wooden boxes, and after some tests I crossed my fingers and decided that they will do.

I had to drink the bottles of wine first. You know, sometimes you have to do sacrifices

You can see now the structure is "closed". The large foamboard piece in the back is a mere continuation of the board and will allow me to build the backdrop. Or whatever you choose to call that part.

In the pic below I,ve added another piece of foamboard to give depth and I have tested how these tiny rails will look.

After all I guess we'll need a mine in a... well, a mining town!

The rails come from the Terrain Crates ranges by Mantic Games. My general idea is to make the access to the mine over there somehow. The exact details are a problem for future Suber, but current Suber has enough issues to deal with just now.

For example, I need to connect the existing board with this new section. Though my original idea was building stairs both up and down, I had to admit it was too ambitious (it made the section unplayable, as there would be no room left to put the minis in, much less to handle them or to play). So I settled with wider stairs down:

And that kind of configured my next decisions

I closed the building by adding the facade and closing the archway with the stairs

Nothing is glued yet

Then I gave some shape to the "backdrop" (whatever), carving more caves and windows:

Just repeating what I had done in earlier stages

Now I see that these caves are way too regular in shape, but we'll come back to that later. At the moment I was simply defining spaces, thinking I was doing it right and trying to get all the pieces along, while playing mental chess and making decisions three steps ahead.

Step by step. This is the basic configuration of the lower, smaller cave:

There will be doors and stuff. Eventually

Ahhh, enjoyable megalomaniac views

This will be (more or less) the upper, larger cave

I insist in making them playable, so they have to be accessible. It forces you to make boring decisions, but you don't want to get your hand stuck in the board!!

In my mind it all makes sense, promise

So this is more or less the basic shape of the rear part. Very crude, I know, but it serves my purposes now. I have a general idea of what I'll be doing in that center space left and about the access to the mine. But before I get there, I have to do tons of work first!

Some texture, the same method I've always used

Texture within, texture without

Of course at this point this monster is beginning to be difficult to handle (beginning, ha!). However, now it's the moment you take it to the window in the middle of the night, as the deranged madman you have become by now.

Mwahahahahaha!!

I've been using a Montana94 spray for this board. I'm afraid it died while priming this, but of course it was half full (yes, I'm an optimistic by nature) and above all, I hadn't used it in almost two years. So all in all, its performance was better than anyone could have expected.

Kind of finally taking shape!

However, there was a thing that was really bothering me. As said before, I was getting the impression that this was all way too regular. Yeah, I've seen perfectly vertical rocks and perfectly shaped caves in them. But this all looked too artificial, too square. So I was slowly making the decision to make some rougher edges and irregular shapes.

You get better ideas in the daylight

So I spent the little clay and little spray paint I had left and the board looked like this:

Crude WIP, yet visual

This is it for now! I'm planning to reshape the square caves, and I've done some experiments with stairs and stuff to make them accessible to its dwellers. But that all will have to wait for another day. The most important thing is that I've resumed production and I'm full of ideas and will! Of course real life will dictate my tempo, but for sure next installment of this won't be in two years time!

Cheers!