Hills in Optio

Hills are a unique feature in Optio, but require a little preparation to implement.

Most wargame hills look like this, nice little neat round kopjies in the middle of a flat bushveld:

Problem is that most hills outside of Africa (and in Africa too come to think of it) don't look like kopjies and armies that used hills weren't constrained by the hill's narrow dimensions to deploy only a percentage of their forces on them.

Real hills are more like this. An entire army could deploy along the length of one.

So, how to replicate that on the gaming table? It means creating hills of any size and shape. In Optio I do it with a battlefield cloth, magnetic sheeting and hill segments.

The magnetic sheeting can be bought easily and cheaply. I got 4m x 60cm for a song at Maizey. Putting two strips side by side to give me my playing area of 80x160cm, I marked out a 10cm grid on the sheets, on the magnetic side.

Next, the hill segments. There are four of them: hilltops, hill sides, hill corners and hill inverted corners. Some of the hilltops are 20x20cm and cover four sheet squares. I made them from corrugated cardboard, but one could always 3D print them or make them from wood.

Hilltop:

Hill side:

Hill corner:

Hill inverted corner (its function will become clear further down):

With these hill segments on can create simple hills:

Or much larger ones  with more complex shapes, and multi-storeyed if you like. Now you can see how the inverted corner works:

To create hilly terrain one first sets up the hill segments on the magnetic sheeting, conforming them to the grid:

The battlefield cloth (printed quite cheaply at SG Branding) is then draped over them and positioned so its squares correspond to the square grid of the magnetic sheeting (more or less):

Terrain discs now come into play. They are made of pieces of battlefield cloth glued to magnetic sheeting and cut in a roundish shape that fits within a terrain square:

The discs are applied, magnetic side down, to the battlefield cloth. They snap strongly to the magnetic sheeting beneath. First, one fixes the corners of the sheet in place then puts discs around the hills to define them.

Et voila! You have hilly terrain. Now to put down trees, rivers, etc. and finally the armies.

Following on a post in the comments, here is the battlefield cloth as a free pdf. Getting the cloth printed is easy enough - just find a branding company that does tablecloths.