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The Dancing Hut - Theory and Practice

This is a chibi Star Wars toy. It is a Darth Maul designed for very tiny kids, which is kind of funny by itself. Not really a kid-friendly character.

But, for this scratchbuild, we are going to use the "techno chicken legs". We're going for a steampunk Baba Yaga hut. The large size of the toy will give it a nice scale with respect to 28mm figures. So, let's begin the scale mashing ...

Two basics - First, the legs are mounted on a CD. This will make a nice solid base for the hut.

Second, It's BA-ba ya-HA. The "G" is a soft guttural one that sounds more like an H in English. And the accent is on the second syllable. Sometime later we'll talk about the cheese that comes from the Dutch town of Gouda.

The hut itself is made from a milk carton with a corrugated cardboard roof and a double fistfull of random plastic greeblies. I'm especailly proud of the door, which is surrounded by wierd, spiky sprue bits.

Now time for the advanced lesson. I marked the top of the legs with paint, then pressed them on to the bottom of the hut to identify where the leg holes go. The second part of the advanced lesson is it would have been better to fix the legs to the hut before adding the greeblies. I'm sure that will be useful for some other project later.

And the attached view. I glued them on with household adhesive and then after it dried, I filled in the gaps with greenstuff and let that dry overnight.

Here it is primed in an industrial brown.

Here it is painted up, with a couple of supporting miniatures.

On the right we have a Baba Yaga in a steampunk cauldron. It's the same figure as the Baba Yaga in the middle, made with a hooded HeroClix figure. The standing one got a tech backpack, complete with green translucent sparky stuff. The cauldron got a bigger backpack for an engine and Baba Yaga got an uncovered female head. There on the left is her black cat, cobbled together from several different robot parts.

Here's the hut being put into use. It will be a dynamic terrain item for a game of Troll Ball. Pretty simple mechanism - a small sub deck of cards with red for turn right and black for turn left, both 45 degrees, and rank gives distance. I used the three through six of all four suits. This gives it enough reasonably predictable movement to be able to avoid but enough randomness that you have to pay attention to it every turn. A nice balance.

And the players are my Addams Family figures, plus Baba Yaga ... a distant relative, perhaps? So, the old witch (well, the new one) makes it four on four, boys against the girls. A good game.

Here we can see the ball (a skull on a base) in the upper left that. It is being contested by both teams. In the middle of the board, we can see some nice interaction going on. Lurch has been "nudged" into a prone position by Baba Yaga. Using QILS and Troll Ball

Here's a shot of the house that has moved dangerously close to a number of figures. They will have to do a little run away with their next move, which will affect their positioning around the ball.

After a while, SWMBO (my opponent) decided that she didn't like the dice next to the figures on the board, so we stopped doing that. In this shot, we can see the result of a nice chain kick. The Morticia kicked it to Wednesday, who cleared it far out into the field. It's nice when actual soccer tactics work in the game.

And the reverse angle view. The girls are closest to the ball and I don't have one of the boys close enough to catch up.

I made a run for the ball, but Gomez got knocked on his butt, and the girls were able to score a goal, which made game. We had five minutes left for time, but decided to call the game and get an extra beer instead. All around, a good time.