Joe came into the office today with a little surprise for me - some adobe buildings in 15mm scale, made out of balsa wood and intended for some wargaming further down the line. Now, Joe is a bit of a legend when it comes to making terrain - I've got some cool hillbilly shacks (now with added outhouse) that he put together for one of our projects that only partially got off the ground before we (I) were (was) sidetracked by other shiny things, and a load of English Civil War-y barns and farm buildings in various stages of ruin. Recently, he's taken to moulding and casting his own flagstones, walls and the like in plaster, resulting in some exceptionally chunky Medieval structures.

Now, while I happily admit I couldn't even come close to that kind of terrain-building skill, I also have a duty to keep Joe grounded, and stop him getting carried away, so I thought it would be a good idea to show him things like this: a Roman port city in 10mm scale, built by the guys at Roman Seas.

Then, of course, we move onto projects like this... a ruined Medieval/Renaissance city designed for use with GW's Mordheim game... if Joe's self-casting project eventually extends to this, I will be both impressed and chuffed!

However, the bar has been raised anew since I saw this in-scale model of Shanghai as it is predicted to look in 2020. The model is more than 100 square metres (1,000 square feet) in size, and is just plain stunning. I never thought I'd ever want to go to an Urban Planning Museum, but this makes it almost worth it... perhaps with the theme from Godzilla playing on my iPod... (yes, I know that was actually Tokyo!)

Of course, now all Joe has to do is do the same thing with Oxford. In 15mm. After all, the devil finds work for idle hands, so it's good to keep him busy!