A friend of mine, a real demented friend of mine, gifted me, some Christmas ago, a small Zen Garden that you can put on your desk. He thought to be witty, but I hated him (well, he is still one of best friends of mine, so I didn’t kill him). Now, what could I do with this little newage crap for puffs? I put it on a bookshelf for some years. After I had the right idea.
When you go to conventions you have to take with you a lot of miniatures and a beautiful terrain if you want to show a game. But the game is full of options and a convention is full of people, of confusion and of heat, so you cannot have the right attention from your guests. A easy move is to present simple scenarios with less rules and standard troops. That results as a watered down version of your game, and so you give away a poor aspect for your game. So I thought to a specific game only for conventions, with a small terrain, few miniatures, easy rules, fast explanations. A game contained in a zen garden that you can put on your desk…

My mini zen garden is really mini. It can be used only with 6mm miniatures but you have to buy an hundred when you only want ten. So I brought from IKEA a simple and small frame (Nyttja type) at 5 euros for a two pack. I closed one part with cardboard, put a lot of vinyl glue and spread quartz sand. My intention was to design the classical tracks of zen gardens, but the glue was too thick so I had a lot of lumps. I tried to solve this situation but the final effect was more a Lunar surface than a garden for Japanese monks. At the end, I didn’t give to it a particular importance, I have got my terrain, if it is not so zen I don’t care. I can always tell the story that it is a zen garden in the middle of the fighting storm! So no regular tracks, but scattered sand!
Then I added some trinkets I found in the mini box, as the rake, creating obstacles to miniatures.

For the miniatures I ask to Paolo (Ronin Clan) if he can gift me some of his 10mm samurai. Eight are enough for a scenario. To create the bases I brought some rings for rivets in a hardware store. I put here the result on cardboard, ready for the painting process. On a next post more zen on arrival…

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