Project Foy

I am going to be starting a series of posts related to a new project the Battlefield Hobbies team is undertaking. At last year's Little Wars convention, Dave Himm from BfH introduced us to the newest Rapid Fire publication, Battle of the Bulge. We have used the Rapid Fire rule set for a number of our convention games and have always had positive feedback. It seemed to all that this would be a unique opportunity for a new set of games. We all voted on which scenarios we would like to build and the Christmas Day battle at Foy Notre-Dame Belgium won out.

Project Foy, as it is being referred to by us internally, will have it's inaugural run at Little Wars 2009. I will need to backtrack a little bit since the game board is approaching 50% completion, but I intend to walk through our game building process from start to finish.

The very, very start is usually a brainstorming session in a hotel lobby at the end of a long day of convention gaming. We try to plan out which conventions we will attend and games for each convention at least a year in advance. A lot of times these are just rough details. Once we all get back home, the creativity starts. Ideally, we are all working on different projects so that we have a variety of games to choose from for each convention. As much as possible, we try to follow the stated theme for each convention. NavCon for instance is naval wargaming, so we choose only nautical themed games.

Right now, Dave is working on a number of Victory at Sea scenarios. John is just putting the finishing touches on our second full fledged rule set, No Quarter Given. He is also developing a plan for packaging the rule set with all the necessary game materials and offering the result for sale. That leaves me to work on Project Foy.

The nice thing about the Rapid Fire books is that they fully detail their scenarios so you can dive right in to building. Research can be kept to a minimum. As chance would have it, my wife was travelling in Europe on business as we started the project and was only about 120km from Foy. I convinced her to drive up on a Saturday and take a bunch of pictures of the town and the surrounding countryside. She even brought back some misc. rocks and things so our Foy game board will have elements of the actual site!

Most of our game boards to this point have been created as 4'x8' sections. This makes the materials easy to find, but really limits us when transporting. Project Foy marks the first time we will try 2.5'x3' sections. This particular board will be 4 sections total (5'x6' in the end). I will spare you the messy process of cutting down full size materials to the smaller sections, so this is where the project really starts ......