Sharp Practice Blinds (Hidden Movement Markers)

After playing a few games of Sharp Practice, I was convinced that something more photogenic than cards was needed to represent the movement of hidden troops within the fog of war.

Having an enormous soft spot for making fun terrain pieces, I am using this "need" to justify making some vignettes representing signs of a hidden enemy trying to outmaneuver you through the forests of the North American theater. These hidden movement markers could be useful in other games, such as Musket and Tomahawk, which use similar mechanics in game. The first installment in this series will be  a stone wall with a hat on a stick set up as a decoy.

The wall itself is made from some (unfortunately in my area) rare blue foam. I love this high density foam, as it is fairly resilient once painted, and is easy to texture. In this case, I draw the stone shapes in with a ballpoint pen...

... and (several hours later) voila. You can actually get some very deep grooves into the foam using only the pen. The rounded tip keeps the material from crumbling or tearing, so after the initial lines are down, you can really go at it.

Mounted on a 6" x 4" piece of MDF, you can see the wall on the sand-textured base now has the decoy hat leaned against it on a stick made of paper clip clippings. The hat is left over from a Perry Brothers ACW infantry set, but is nondescript enough to work as a backwoods hat for many time periods.

Leaning a little more toward vignette than purely functional game token, the peice will include a small segment of dirt road, somewhat visible here as the finer sand runnign diagonally across the base.

Here the wall is basecoated with some craft acrylic from a craft store. No need to waste fine hobby paints here, as it needs to be applied liberally to make sure the foam wall is completely coated so to keep it from melting when I spray-prime the rest of the piece. (If you're wondering about the painted sand - I had left over paint from the wall and didn't want it to go to waste...)

Stay tuned next time as the base gets some paint and grass.