Tuscany Hill Village Terrain Build

To get this right, I’ve been looking at a lot of images of various Italian villages. The buildings are key to getting this right to give the look and feel of Italy.

As you can see from the images, there are quite a few distinct areas that need to be nailed to get the look right, most notably,

• The roof tiles
• Towers
• The close packed nature of the buildings
• The variable height and widths of the buildings that create a very non uniform view
• Buildings that are a mixture of fairly plain and some with arched windows, balconies etc

Most of the above should be possible however the close packing of the buildings could be a challenge if the terrain piece is designed for gaming. There needs to be fields of fire, several entry points etc otherwise it will become too much of a fortress. So this will need a little thought to get the balance right.

Also from the pictures, we can see distinct rock colours, both for the buildings as well as for the actual rocks. There is also a lot of lush vegetation that needs to be included – especially cypress trees.

I like my WW2 gaming and particularly the Italian campaign. There is no good reason for this, perhaps it is because it is not as widely known as other theatres of WW2. Perhaps it is due to how hard the battles were. Or the vast number of different nationalities fighting the battles. Regardless, I’ve spent some time building up armies of little fighting men from this theatre – 1st Fallschirmjager, 26th Panzer Division, North Irish Horse Tank Regiment and so forth. Anyone really interested can take a look at my project:

75th Anniversary of the Battle of Monte Cassino and Northern Italy (Gaming The Battles)

To complement these, I’ve gradually been building up some terrain to add to the setting. One terrain piece alludes me – a traditional Italian hill top village as you might find in Tuscany.

This is a project that I actually started some time ago and I’m only now getting round to writing it up. I’m lazy.

My aim in this project is not to build a full table on hill top village, although that would look amazing, as space and time doesn’t allow it. What I am aiming to build is a stylised version of a hill top village that can be made into a put down terrain piece on a standard 6×4 table.

It should be big enough to look like a village but not so big that it becomes the entire gaming table or takes up all of the space.

I also play all of my games in 15mm, so it needs to fit to this scale.