Dave's Games Ruined Longhouse

When I posted my last ATZ batrep, I included on my game-board a couple of brand new buildings that I'd made recently. They were both fairly small ruined houses and both came from a card scenery company whom I have never mentioned before - Dave's Games. Dave's Games is run by Dave Graffam and he mainly produces buildings for the fantasy gamer, most of which are of little use to contemporary gamers like myself. However, he also makes a range of ruined buildings, which can be used in so many historical periods and genres. I bought a bundle pack of his ruined buildings late last year and got 17 buildings in the set for roughly £25.00. Absolutely fantastic value for money. Anyway, here is the first of his buildings that I made - the ruined longhouse.

I chose to make this building first, simply because it was the easiest to make and I knew it'd only take me a couple of days to complete. At the time that I made this I was also working on my WWG Mayhem City Police Station. I made this to give myself a break from making so many furniture items. I learnt the hard way that you can only make so many pieces of furniture before it becomes a chore.

The building has a footprint of 6" by 4" and is 4" tall. As you can see it is nothing more than four walls, a floor and a chimney. The hardest part of making it was cutting out the holes in the walls, and to be honest, that wasn't a very difficult task.

Here is an overhead view of the building, showing off the flagstoned floor with a scattering of rubble on it. Those of you not familiar with Dave Graffam's models may be thinking, yeah, I can see that, so what? Well, Dave's models have a special ingredient that makes them totally awesome and even better value for money than you'd imagine. It's called layers. Layers allow you to customise each model to your hearts content, giving you so many options that you could build hundreds of this model with every one of them being unique. For the floor, you have three basic options - flagstones (as shown here), concrete blocks and wood panelling. For the rubble, which you can add or leave out, you have four options. I chose options three and four. Options one and two added broken wooden beams.

This is one of the long side walls with the door in. The door is a separate layer, so if you don't want it on this wall you can leave it off. For my walls, I chose the plaster over bricks option. Other choices were bricks, stone and wood. The plaster option overlays one of the three basic choices. Here, you can see the brickwork showing through the gaps in the plaster rendering.

Here is one of the short walls, showing a massive hole in it that a person could walk through without any bother. Further options for your walls are stone corners and/or wooden beams to give it that Tudor-style look.

Here is the second of the long walls, and I chose to add two windows to it. The internal walls are textured the same as the external walls, however, you do have an option for wooden interior walls, if you fancied a contrast.

This is the second short wall, with the chimney stack abutting it. The chimney is asymmetrically shaped. The sticky-out bit (actual architectural term!) at the bottom can face to the left or to the right. Your choice. If you add up all the choices of layers that you're presented with it soon becomes apparent that my assertion that you could make hundreds of these buildings with each one being unique and different from the others is no exaggeration. This has to be the greatest strength of Dave's models. The level of customisation you have at your fingertips is simply breath-taking. Also, bear in mind, this is probably the simplest of his ruined buildings to make. With his more complex buildings the choices of customisation are even greater. In the advertising industry, a product should have a U.S.P. (Unique Selling Point) to make it stand out from its competitors. Dave's Games' U.S.P. is undoubtedly layers. Fat Dragon Games have layers on some of their models (with the likes of bullet holes, dirt or graffiti, for example) but nowhere near the extent offered by Dave Graffam.
The bundle of 17 ruined buildings that I bought just knocked me for six when I saw what I could do with them. I should point out that all of the ruined buildings are available to purchase separately but I'd definitely advise going for the bundle pack, which is far greater value for money. If you wanted to buy the ruined longhouse separately, it costs just £1.31 according to the RPG Now and Wargame Vault websites that I looked at this morning. Both sites stock the full range of Dave Graffam models.
The idea of adding layers to WWG models has been put forward on their forum, but it looks unlikely to happen, which I personally, think is a great shame.
The more novels that I read about a zombie apocalypse, the more I realise that so many buildings are going to end up in a ruined state. Fire, for example, will destroy many of them. I also realised that my own version of Mayhem City was going to need a lot more ruined buildings than I originally envisaged. So expect to see more ruined buildings in my ATZ batreps. I'll tell you now that a lot of them are going to come from Dave's Games.