After talking with some friends tonight about the new miniatures that FF has been putting out, we decided to make a model of Arkham to use as a large gameboard. While making it look like a 3D town, we also want to make it functional to be used for playing AH with the miniature investigators and monsters.

We've got about a half dozen of us who will be working on it and are exerienced in painting models and making scenery for miniaturs games, but if anyone has ideas, suggestions, or have tried it yourselfs I'd love to hear you. We are assuming this project will take awhile (year+) to complete but I hope to post some progress as we get along.

At this point the plan is to create ten 2.5x2.5 foot sections. One for each neighborhood along with a tenth for cards and tracks. These will be lined up together 2x5 to make a 5x12.5 foot board. Were starting with the South Side Uptown section of the board and making our way North. This section appears to be the edge of town and after looking through a bunch of 20's road side pictures from New England we've decided to make these sections hard dirt that will turn into paved as you head north.

We fooled around with a general layout last night but need the first three models to start marking where things will go exactly. These have been ordered and I'll put up pictures when they're done. The actual miniatures provided by FF seem to fit O scale, but work well enough with HO as long as your not putting the people right next to the buildings.

The buildings above are from an old HO train and are intended to give a general idea. Anywhere on the road will be considered the street while a space next to each building will be used as being at that location. A small space in the corner has been marked off for location cards.

I have been in the planning stages of this very same project for a long time now. Theres just so much to plan out before starting. I would love to see how you intend to lay out the streets and buildings. Have you created a street plan yet?

As much as I would like to make it look more like a functonal town rather than a glorified game board, I find that space and funds will end up preventing that.With that in mind our lay out of the streets are going to end up pretty much connecting as they do on the game board. Each 2.5x2.5 section I'm going to use for neighborhoods will be arranged in much the way they appear on the board layout, so the streets will hitch up as they do there. A whole lot of T intersections will end up happening. The one exception to this simplified system will be the University. While the roads will essentially head out to the three sides, Uptown, French Hill and Merchant, We'd love to fit in a campus green if possible. The buildings for the most part we plan on putting right up to the road as most would be in a realistic placement, then using space next to each as a location area with about enough space to place four of the large monster bases in a square fashion. Shown in the picture above we used some HO buildings and makers to get a general feel for this and test it's feasiiblility on Southside , but I'm refraining from setting up exact measurements till I have the three buidings together to know their true demensions.

The photos we looked through on 1920's streets in towns about the size of Arkham showed that most were the street with a sidewalk running along it, though the sidewalks were not the slabs most of us are accustomed to today. Fortunately there wasn't a whole lot of extras by the sides of the road at that point ie: hydrants, mailboxes, and what not, so that will simplify things.

The ten boards we are working on will end up fitting together as such

Southside Uptown

French University

River Merchanct

East Extra

Downtown Northside

I not sure if I made it clear above but each of the neighborhoods sections will be a seperate square board that will all line up when put together, but will also be capable of being removed and moved seperately. Once completed I don't intend to be moving the whole setup very often, but we're hoping this way will make it at least possible should the need arise.

Thanks for replying. I see what you are trying to do and its very similar to mine. Although, my first thoughts are to go n scale to save space and not use minis. Thus I only need a space about the size of the game board locations size to stack monsters and heroes on at each location.

I agree with you on the whole making it look like a town also, but I think I have come up with a few tricks to help with that.

The layout can be manipulated so the streets make more sense as a town. Right away I wanted to avoid linking a straight street into another straight street like I have seen some others do. For one, it makes little sense in a town layout, and for two, I just hate the look, makes the entire town kind of a square box with the streets running around it. It also makes it hard to denote where one street ends and another starts. By playing with the layout, I found you can get all the same connections and make each neighborhood equal one street. So for instance, merchant district will be one street with the 3 locations located ANYWHERE on that street. Connecting neighborhoods are all one street also that meet up at an intersection of some type (T, X, or angles, whatever). So moving would be like so:

Investigator moves from Merchant street to University street to the science building (possibly to trade?), back to the university street, to French hill street, to Silver Twilight lodge…etc..

Streets can continue off the board to give the sense that the town continues beyond what is shown as long as they never cross another street they should not be connected too. All locations are located somewhere on the street or on a driveway or small dirt road connected to the street so moving is intuitive. (using this idea for various things like to place the asylum off in the corner of the board but still connecting to downtown street via a dirt entry drive lined by trees up a hill. Asylum will be based off Danvers Asylum like its supposed to be, but compressed down to managable size)

With this I have even started to think about how not all locations need to have entire buildings made. For instance the Asylum noted above could potentially be huge (Danvers was a sprawling building with many out buildings) Since I'm thinking that it's on a hill in the corner of the board with the drive up to the entrance, I only have to indicate the asylum is there by doing some of the front of it and cutting it off at the board edges, giving the impression it continues off the board. Maybe like if I placed the building diagonal in that corner.

The point is that there is alot of arranging you can do to make it look more like a town. If I get a chance, I will try to upload some sketches I have done of various road layouts that show quite a bit of variation. Things like the general store located next to Independence square and the church next to the graveyard and such.

Good Luck!

I like your ideas on street placement. Perhaps making it look something like this…..

Off Board -> |

| To Uptown ->

---------------------

/

/ <- Southside

|

|

<- Off board | To University ->

----------------------------------------------------------

|

|

| <-- French Hill

|

|

Rather than this……

To Uptown ->

-------------------------

/

/

|

| <---- Southside

|

| To University ->

---------------------------------------

|

|

| <-French Hill

|

|

V

I am working on something similar. I decided that I will use n scale road ways connecting all the streets but I will not make any streets to the locations. This should free up a lot of the congestion that the original board feels like it has. I made a thread about it if you guys are interested in seeing it.

I would love to hear more about how you guys think things should be arranged. My project is still in the beginning and would love some more input.

I made a 3-D Map. Picasa won't let me link to the Pics, so here goes:

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Here we go, Photobucket this time, sorry