Laying bridges

In my, hopefully not too distant, future I have planned a new game of Chain of Command to show it to more people in my town.

To prepare for said game, I have been thinking about maps and looking at the terrain I already have. I don't want this to be just another table. I want us to play in an interesting map, hopefully with a bit of history behind it, not necessarily a real location, but a realistic one, grounded on real events. Looking around on the Internet, searching for ideas, I decided for a German attack on a bridge over a canal defended by British, probably on the Dunkir perimeter in 1940.

 

My idea is that the Germans will also have the chance to cross the canal with assault boats if the bridge ends up being too strongly defended. To cross a river in Chain of Command you have to roll two dice and discard the lower roll, so you could cross a 6" river in one throw. So I decided that my canal will be around 7,8 wide.

For the whole project I will need:
- 1 Bridge
- At least 6 pieces of 20cm x 30cm for the canal
- Assault boats.

As I have mentioned in other posts, getting anything Wargame related in my country means ordering abroad with all the cost and times involved, so scratch building the bridge looked like an interesting challenge.

My inspiration was the bridge sold by Sarissa Precision, a replica of the Bruegel Bridge. More specifically the version Lardy Rich did of this bridge. I mostly eyeballed the measurements, keeping it 5cm wide like my roads.

The main part of the bridge is made out of coffee stirrers.  The elevating mechanism is made out of coffee stirrers, ice cream sticks and square wood. The ramps where the most difficult part. At first I tried to carve them out of a single piece of MDF, but that was impossible. In the end I decided to use a base of MDF and the actual ramps are made of Sintra.

The elevation mechanism works but I don't know if it will be ever used. In the end it probably only adds another layer of complexity and fragility to what is simply a gaming piece after all.

I added railings to the ramps and the bridge itself. I also decorated the ramps with square thin cardboard to simulate cobblestone or something similar. Getting the railings to stick to the Sintra was quite difficult.

The end product after a couple of weeks. There is a British patrol crossing an imaginary canal.

I have allready started working on the canal. It's a simple construction so I hope it won't take me long to finish it.