Old School Games Table and One Big Step Closer to Rolica!

 What better way to spend the Fourth of July than in the basement working on a game board.  All of the Independence day fireworks have been cancelled due to the pandemic, so the basement seemed like a good option for the afternoon at least.

 

 Last weekend I patched the hole I had to cut in the table to accommodate the basement's structural support pillar.  I little filler and some spackle made quick work of this task.  That and a light sanding made it ready for painting.

 Before painting I wanted to cover all of the spackle and white boundary lines of the ping pong table with a relatively uniform shade of green as a primer.  I also painted the support pillar a sky blue and intend to conscript my daughter to paint some pine trees around the lower portion where it emerges from the table.  It will be a really dense impassable forest!

While that was drying a rabbit was outside eating all of my vegetables, so after a culinary decimation of the rodent kind, I wanted to tidy up the garden and put some poultry netting around it.  All of that is just to say I do actually have other chores around the house and it's not all fun a games.  If I could only figure out a way to still make an income and not have to work....

 July the Fourth morning was spent in the Garden before the heat of the day hit.  Not quite finished!

 With my chores done it was time to turn my attention to the game board.  Here I have several contour maps of the Rolica battlefield that I used to guide the cutting of the hillside.

The first layer of 1/2 inch insulation foam board, ready for cutting.  Each subsequent layer represents a 25 foot gain in elevation.

 The contour lines of the hills assembled.  Thank goodness for the hot wire foam cutter I found on clearance several years back at the local art store!

In this shot you can more clearly see the "cuts" into the hillside that the British used to try and advance up the hill.  Lots more work still to do but this is a huge step forward!