Playing with Paper

 

Some years ago I helped my son cut out a couple of paper armies, one for the English Civil War, the other for the Wars of the Roses.  They provided cheap, colourful and lightweight armies that he could take easily to school to fight with friends there and we had a few ECW games ourselves.  For quite a few years they have been gathering dust on a shelf in the gaming shed.  There the pikes and muskets of the Civil War remain, but the bills and bowmen of the Wars of the Roses have been in the field testing out Adrian Nayler's 'Blood Red Roses', as reported a few weeks ago.

What I found when moving the paper armies around was that many of the flags and thin ends of weapons had been bent badly and all looked in need of straightening out and repair to damage.  I also found that I would need quite a few more stands to be able to fight the size of battles that Blood Red Roses allows.  This set me thinking about how to make lasting repairs and whether there were different approaches to making up the stands that would be more durable than the original design of two leaves of paper folded together and fixed with white glue.

Flags and figures askew

The advice of the designer of these cutout figures, Peter Dennis, is not to insert any strengthening material between the front and rear of the figures but to rely on white glue to give the required strength, applying extra coatings of this to thin pieces - swords, poles, bow ends, that extend beyond the main body.  This is the approach we took when making the cutouts.  It was quick.  It worked to begin with.  Now, however, the figures look tattered and almost all the flags are near to detachment in a non-Buddhist sense.

Two objections are given to thickening the figures.  The first is practical - it makes the cutting out more difficult - the second aesthetic - a thick white line around the edge of the figures does not appeal to the designer.  Given the length of pikes and their inherent vulnerability to bending in use, Peter Dennis does allow that these be made by sandwiching a piece of 120gram paper between the front and back pages.  This does seem to work well as neither the pike armed Scots and Flemings from the Wars of the Roses set nor the Royalist and Parliamentary Pikes from the ECW set have seen much damage.  This was my starting point for testing one approach to making up a new batch of figures.

The other approach was inspired by the idea I followed for repair to the flags on the existing figures, cutting thin strips of clear, flexible plastic and gluing them to the back of the flag bearers and flag poles.  This brought the flags back to upright and seems to stand up to the flexing that is inevitable when picking up or packing away these kinds of figures.

Flags on an Billman block held stiff in the breeze by clear plastic trim glued down the flag pole and extending down the backs of the flag bearer figures.  The points of the bills have been straightened up and reset with a fresh layer of white glue.

What I hoped to be able to achieve with the clear plastic was to stick the front and back pages to it after cutting around the figures and leaving the plastic around the figures without doing more than trimming a neat curve, avoiding the tricky and time consuming work of cutting around the outline of the figures themselves.

The first step was to try each method out on a single figure - using wounded markers.  This worked well.  I used 160 gram paper for the strengthening layer on one figure and had no trouble cutting out after the glue was dry.  For the plastic I used one side of a clear A4 paper holder.  This is thicker than the 160 gram paper but still proved easy to cut through.  As the wounded figure is a very simple shape with no recesses I cut directly round the figure.  The paper stayed stuck firmly to the plastic and didn't seem easy to pull away, which is an effect - I think - of getting the paper well wetted with the glue.

Test figures, paper infill on left, plastic on right.

The question was whether things would still work for a full row of figures with all the nooks and crannies that they present.

A front rank command group and front rank of Kerns.  Both had 160 gram paper interleaved before gluing and are then cut out.

Reverse of the same two groups.  The swords and spears have been reinforced by clear plastic strips.

Another front row of Kerns made using plastic interleaving.  The thin spear end, axe and sword did not adhere well to the plastic.  Worse was the aesthetic effect of the original intention of only slightly trimming the plastic.  It created a shadow round the figures, transformed when the plastic caught the light into some eldritch aura that made the figures seem like something out of a fantasy game, not what I had in mind.  So, what you see is what remains after I went in with a pair of scissors and removed the plastic from most of the recesses.  It looks better but puts an end to any thought of saving time with this method.

The result of this little experiment is that I will continue to use the strips of plastic to repair damaged flagpoles and strengthen other thin parts left after cutting out but will not use it for the main figure blocks.  For these I will continue with 160 gram paper as interleaving.  I have not found it difficult to cut out and, if you find the thicker edges unappealing, it is very easy to trace around them with a brown felt pen to remove the whiteness - or use brown coloured paper to begin with.

An old base, which shows the kind of white edge that the designer claims not to like, even without an extra leaf of paper being used to strengthen the figures.

The same base from the opposite direction after the figures have been straightened out and had the white edge taken off with a quick touch of brown.  This looks better but there is a price in extra time for finishing.

The question is whether such figures, intended to be a quick and cheap way of fielding an army, are worth the added effort to give greater durability?  This is a matter of choice.  I do not see myself upgrading the ECW army ever, now that a 10mm lead army has been painted up for the period.  For the Wars of the Roses, this army does give me a quick way to get into playing the period and I am happy to give some time to tidying up what I already have as well as to making up the numbers in the fashion illustrated above.