Stoelzel's Car Parks

I mentioned in my last Monthly Musings post that I have been making a lot of ground tiles from Carl Stoelzel's Undeveloped Real Estate (URE) set. These are going to replace my WWG ground tiles for my ATZ-FFO campaign. Mayhem City is about to get a lot darker and grittier. When I first downloaded the URE set and saw what it included, I was delighted to see that Carl had added a large car park. Actually, he went one better as he added a parking strip as well. So the first URE ground tiles that I made were the car park and the parking strip. Here they are.

What I have done with the parking strips is to glue two strips back to back to form a small car park. I have added two urban road tiles at the right side of the car park. Logically, there should be more road tiles at the left side, (this is a drive-thru car park, as opposed to an enclosed car park) but I have omitted them due to the size restrictions of my foamboard. I should point out that all eight tiles that make up this car park are glued to a single piece of foamboard measuring 30" by 15". With the two centre tiles (top and bottom) you can extend the parking strip to make it as long as you want. The parking strip comes with two optional tiles and I have included both of them. First up is the tile with the two disabled parking bays, easily identified by the wheelchair symbols and the extra access space for the passengers.

The second optional tile is the crime scene tile, which I simply had to include. After all, Mayhem City is a notoriously violent place, even before it was hit by the zombie apocalypse. This is just one of a few crime scene tiles that Carl has added to the URE set. I think it is great and it made me smile as soon as I saw it. This crime scene tile has just one chalk outline on it where the victim was killed. Others have more victims identified by the chalk outlines.
I need to mention how I make my pavements. You can leave them flat, which is far and away the easiest option. You also have the choice for adding separate pavement pieces to foamboard. In my opinion, I thought that this raised the pavement too far off the ground so I came up with a compromise solution. I have glued my pavements to two strips of mounting card glued back to back. The double height mounting card raises the pavement about 3mm off the ground, as opposed to 5mm with foamboard. Typically, my solution involves the most work as I have to cut out two pieces of mounting card for each pavement section. It is very time consuming but on the plus side, I do like the end result.
One of the best pages of props that Carl has supplied with this set is a page of newspaper covers. I have added a couple of newspapers to the "island" that Vampifan is standing on. These cover two that Carl had added but by raising the pavement I lost a part of them on the side of the pavement. Adding a couple of the spare newspapers neatly solved that little problem.

This is the proper car park, which consists of 9 tiles. I have added the three urban road tiles to the right and the board measures 30" by 22.5". I use A1 sized foamboard and this is the biggest ground tile I can make out of a single sheet. Found in the Props section of the URE set are a car park ticket machine and a car park automated barrier. I printed out two of each and placed them on my small car park above and on this large car park. Note that they are not glued in place. I also pondered the idea of making the barrier rise and fall but in the end decided it wasn't worth the effort as for most of the time the barriers will be in the down position. Both props are reinforced with mounting card for extra strength and robustness, which should explain why the yellow and black barrier looks so thick. As with the parking strip, you can make the car park much bigger by adding more of the three central tiles.

I thought you'd like to see what the car park looks like when it is full of vehicles. Here is a collection of my card vehicles, mainly from WWG but also including Fat Dragon Games (you can now see how much bigger their sedan cars are compared to those from WWG) and a grey SUV from Mel Ebbles (now Genet Models). Unforgivably, there are no Stoelzel's vehicles in sight and that is because I haven't made any yet. Sorry, Carl! Even so, you have to admit that it does look impressive.
So, what's my verdict on on these ground tiles? Ever since WWG released their TLX Streets of Legend set, I have wanted a car park for Mayhem City. That was three years ago and since then nothing has happened despite numerous requests from me and others. When Carl announced that he was going to produce his own range of ground tiles a few months ago I asked him to include a car park in the set. He listened and he created the car park and the parking strip, both of which are excellent and which more than fulfil my needs. I thank you, Carl. I noticed that both Colin and Shintokamikaze mentioned that the car park was the first thing that they made from the URE set. I wasn't surprised. Any town or city needs car parks. If you want a car park for your campaign I urge you to look no further.
Also, bear in mind that the car park and the parking strip are just a very small part of the URE set. Next time I'll be reviewing some of the urban tiles from the set. I'll see you then.