Eye for Design: New Setting the Scene Winter Wargaming Book

Eye for Design: Setting the Scene Winter Wargaming, is a self-published book that provides a guide to get you started in making and painting terrain, vehicles and figures for a winter setting. The theme is set in the winter of 1944 – the Ardennes – but it could be used for any winter setting.

Operation ‘Wacht am Rhein’ or ‘Watch on the Rhine’, more commonly known as the Battle of the Bulge, was the German name for what would be Hitler’s last great offensive of the war. It took place in the Ardennes on the Belgium/German border during the late part of 1944 in freezing winter conditions and unsuitable terrain for such a large military undertaking.  

Setting the Scene tries to capture a little of the action and events of this conflict with painted 28mm miniature figures and vehicles fighting over commercial and scratch built winterised terrain. There are other informative and detailed books and websites out there on how to make winter dioramas for the modeller, but this book provides a step-by-step guide to making and painting what the wargamer needs to set the scene for a winter wargames table. Far from being a modelling master class for diorama building, this book is set at a more basic level for producing scenery that will cover a wargames table, whatever its size, that is interchangeable and flexible and straightforward to make, yet good enough to have that diorama feel to it.

Although the setting is based on the Ardennes, with a few minor changes of terrain and a swap of appropriate figures, you could be fighting on the Eastern Front during WW2 or carrying out a rear-guard action with a defeated French Napoleonic army during the retreat from Moscow. Washington’s Crossing of the Delaware River in the winter of 1776 to catch the Hessians off guard at the Battle of Trenton or a War of the Roses at Tewksbury are just a few of the many winter engagements you can now refight on appropriate looking terrain.

Hopefully, this book will help you in ‘Setting the Scene’ so you can get started in fighting some of your winter battles over a snow-covered landscape that looks cold enough to turn those little lead soldiers into ice.