The Circus begins!

Long term readers will remember that I created a game contained within a wall paper table. That particular game was an underground car park zombie game. Being inspired by: War in a box
I have been keen to follow his example but in my own way. Given the dimensions of the paste table I started to imagine what sort of game I could fit in one. Being long and thin a couple of ideas finally emerged my favourite was the Chariot race of the Roman Circus. So this is the first post about how I can bring that project to fruition.


My first task was to strip out any and all car-park parts. After all the Romans were advanced, but as carts were not allowed into Rome except at night! (or so I have read). Stripping it all out was quick and really quite enjoyable. All my projects have a budget and as the zombie car park had past it's sell by date it was due to be recycled into something new and hopefully exciting. Obviously is Money and Space were not issues I would have just used a new paste table. But until I do win the national lottery they will be issues and as such I have to be realistic.

being limited to the size of the Circus I will build I have not decided which scale would be most appropriate. I will build the arena and then see what fits best. To many people this may seem the wrong way of doing a project, but given the space restrictions I have set myself it seems the right way to go.

As the Circus arena being a race track was created with curved walls at the end of each straight. One of my early jobs was to make these. I cut 4 90degree corner sections, one for each of the corners of the paste table. I was limited by my need to close the table and by the materials I had at hand so used some scrap 12mm MDF. This brings up a couple of problems. The walls would need to be representational as opposed to a realistic height for anything above a 6mm 1/300th scale. While not ideal it is acceptable. The main issue is that I have no nails small enough to hold the corners in place. Fortunately these corner pieces fit quite snugly in place. I have used PVA white wood glue (resin W) and will give them a few days to dry which given the weather I feel they will need.

The central reservation has been fabricated out of some off- cut battening. Again this is too thin for the smallest nails I have, and again is now held with PVA white wood glue. Using scrap I have not measured widths and heights other than by eye. However, this is not such a bad thing as it saves me time and money and a trip out to B+Q in the rain. As you can see I have rounded the ends to aid chariot turns. I had no circle template or compass with me nor could I find any pot or lid of the right dimensions and now that I look at the picture while typing this they don't look to be as precise as I would have liked them. Moving on I know it's something my club players will not worry about too much as it is the idea that counts and little things like that won't make too much difference in a game.

As you can see I have only room to work on half the board at a time.So I will need to allow about 1 week to pass with drying time to allow the glue to set and the whole arena to reach the same level. You can see from the picture on the right that the proportions do not look too distorted. At present this is only the basic construction but even so I does give a flavour of how it might turn out. There are a couple of stages to still go in construction but until the glue has had time to dry I will not attempt them. All construction projects have phases in which they look tatty. This is one of those phases, it would look better if I was not re-using materials but you can still see the direction this project is heading. Construction wise I can see another 2 week of work ahead but most of that will be waiting for things to dry. Time invested in this project 1 1/4 hours so still early days.

Thanks for reading.Until next time, take care have a good few days and we shall talk again soon. All the best Clint.