With Historicon over, I had planned to immediately start working on my Pavia project for Historicon 2025. To free my time up for the Pavia project, I had planned not to put on any game at Fall In! 2024 and just throw a small modern Afghanistan game on the table for Cold Wars 2025. I already have everything I need for an Afghanistan game, so that would be easy. This plan came apart when I visited the vendor hall at Historicon. This is how the project “Modern Haiti in 28mm” began.
I had always wanted a different theater of operations for my modern 28mm figures. Having already done Afghanistan in 28mm, Iraq or Somali just weren’t different enough in terms of terrain. I also am not ready to do modern day Ukraine. One possibility was doing a more Central African shanty type town. The problem that I had with this idea, was that a lot of representations of shanty towns seem a little too cartoony for me – more of what people think a shanty town should look like, rather than what they actually look like.
That is when I decided on modern Haiti in 28mm. The US actively got involved in Haiti in 2004 by sending in the US Marines. This meant that I could use my marine figures and vehicles. The island also has a lot of jungle type terrain, so I could re-use the jungle terrain bases that took so long to make for my Japan-China Senkaku project. Also, many of the buildings are painted extremely bright colors, and while not modern design, are quite well maintained. These colorful buildings are what interested me as they would make for a very different table.
I quickly purchased and painted a number of buildings from the Miniature Building Authority range that are close to Haitian buildings from photos that I have assembled. I am now in the process of detailing the outside and inside of the buildings.
I based each building on its own base for two reasons. The first is to allow a quick table set up. The second is so that I can add a lot of details and vegetation to the scene. I am trying to create many small vignettes.
The project has come together in about three weeks. I have about 60 figures of Haitian insurgents that I need to paint, but they should not take long.
The base terrain was my WarSigil Afghanistan mat. I then cut out sections of a teddy bear fur mat and placed it on top. The building bases and jungle bases were then added as a final layer.
Not only were the brightly colored buildings fun to paint, but I also enjoyed weathering both the tin roofs and rusting the side of the buildings. The next two photos show some of the weathering effects.
I plan to officially unveil this project Modern Haiti in 28mm project at Barrage later this year. It will be my first time running a game at Barrage, so I hope that it is well received. I have really enjoyed this project as it came together very quickly. I managed to reuse troops, vehicles and some scatter terrain from my afghan project as well as jungle from my Senkau project. This reuse of items really kept the work down and allowed me to concentrate on the buildings. Once the figures are painted, I really must get back to Pavia.