The Game's Afoot...

I've been collecting and painting various figures and vehicles, for what seems like an age, for a planned 'Pulp' style series of Sherlock Holmes themed games. The figures have come mainly from Foundry's ranges, where their newer Victorian range are currently £5.00 a pack if you can visit the shop, and Ironclad Miniatures. The latter do a nice range of 'unusual' steam powered vehicles, but I've also sourced some horse drawn ready painted plastic coaches from a local Antiques Market, at £5.00 each a steal at the time, and used Dixon Miniatures stagecoach horse for the carriage teams..
What has been holding the project back, apart from funds obviously, has been my indecision when it came to the choice of buildings. Ideally I wanted something to have a 'life' through to 1940 for our Blandings/Operation Sealion games too. I had almost decided to buy some of Sarissa's MDF buildings, but was held back by the price really. In the end I decided on the buildings from Oshira Models, having seen them often in games featured on the LAF threads and finally in the 'flesh' at Salute.
I had thought that they too were MDF constructions, but when I collected my first from James at this year's Salute I was surprised by the weight of the box. They are in fact made from a laser cut acrylic, which appears to be clear but has been very lightly sprayed grey. The parts all seemed to dry fit really easily and the level of detail is quite exquisite, so when my second purchase arrived in yesterday's post I decided to assemble one to see what they would look like. Well, you know how it is folks: one became two; two became three and so on...

As I hope you can see from this photo, I plan to use the buildings in conjunction with my existing harbour and cemetery boards, which feature in my 1920's Pulp Games. Oshiro's buildings are modular, with additional floors and two types of roof structure being available in addition to the two floors that are standard in the terraced houses. There are also additional frontages to allow houses to become shops and a pub.

Besides houses and shops there are already small and large factory buildings ~ the small one is in the left foreground of the first picture, while in the left distance of the same picture, you can just see the same building with an ecclesiastical twist, a different facade  turns it into a mission or chapel.

The enlarged photo of the small factory shows that the method of assembly is very similar to that of the more familiar MDF buildings, such as those I assembled for my Old West project from Battleflag, though using superglue as a bond rather than PVA. The roof of each building comes with a sheet of thin card precut slates, like the shingles you'll see on the western buildings in earlier posts. That will be my next phase of assembly before each building can be airbrushed in the dark red colour I've chosen as the base colour. The latter will have to wait until July when I come back from my holiday, as will the decision about the extra buildings I might buy to complete the board layout. I'd quite like a railway viaduct, such as featured in Overlord's 1970's games, also seen on LAF, but I'm not sure about that yet. More as and when on this project. In the meantime I guess it will be some roofing...