Board Extension - Done!

Well it took a bit of fancy timing, with ducking and weaving, watching the World Cup games between coats of paint, but the new 28-inch extension to the battleboards has been duly collected and finished. As an option, I can now play a Commands & Colors game on a 17 hexes x 9 hexes field (over 30% bigger, as they would say in washing powder adverts), or use a similar enhancement in my non-hex plain boards if I deploy them the other way up.

The flank marker is shown as the triple dash marks at the left edge for the normal
13 x 9 game; the single dashes are the flank marker for the 17 x 9 game, with the
three sectors becoming respectively 5, 7 and 5 hexes wide

After 3 coats of the official Crested Moss shade, it became clear that the insert was never going to get to be quite the same colour as the original sections (it's the same paint - it's even the same tin, but the surface texture is slightly different), but it's near enough for jazz. In fact the photos make the difference a little more obvious than it looks when you're in the room with it.

This is just a hurried mock-up to check it works - for a battle, the table stands
in the middle of the room, so there's less space than there appears here

I still have to paint the backside of the new piece, to be honest, but there's no immediate rush for that. My war-games may not be better, but I have the option now of making them bigger.

By the way - in passing - I read that the forthcoming C&C Napoleonics expansion for double-width games is to be called La Grande Battle. What language is this, exactly? I have a good number of American friends, and I know for a fact that as a nation Americans are neither stupid nor ignorant, so why would GMT Games want to try to convince us all otherwise? Why not The Bloody Big Schlacht?

I guess it's a worthy successor to Guard du Corps - Franglais êtranglé strikes again. Come on, GMT - don't blight a good game with a crappy name.