Another shortcoming of my copy of Pandemic is that the research stations are the same basic shape as Power Grid or Settlers houses, but they're way too long. I decided to make my own version of them out of polymer clay that would be smaller and match the theme better.

I won't go over tools and materials in this post, but if you want to know more about what I use and how I do my work, check out my other posts:

* polymer clay track markers for Age of Steam
* polymer clay cubes for Pandemic
* polymer clay Code 777 postmortem

My original idea was to create a modern looking glass building with a helipad and maybe a satellite dish. After a little bit of experimentation, I realized that the satellite dish would be too difficult and tedious to make at the right scale, so I scrapped that idea. I also thought about making them kind of cartoony and distorted but I decided that rectangular would be more realistic and simpler.

The first set I made were just black rectangular prisms that I applied thin strips of a blue glittery clay to in an attempt to emulate the appearance of glass. I then tried to create a helipad design. The descriptions I found indicated a white circle with a white cross inside and a red "H" on that, but at the size I was working with, that was too small to be reasonable and I didn't want to make a complex cane like that just for a half dozen little buildings.

v1.0


For my second attempt, I mixed some white and black clay to make gray clay to simulate concrete and I did layers of clay (on the thickest setting of my pasta machine) alternating the gray and the glitter blue. I decided to just skip the additional detail of the helipad, although I could go back and add that later... I'm just not sure it's really worth the additional effort.

v2.0


I guess next I should make better/smaller player pawns...

I like version 1 a lot. Version 2 doesn't do a whole lot for me.

I like some aspects of v1, but overall they seemed a bit too much like coffins and not enough like buildings to me.

For what it's worth, the actual CDC buildings aren't very impressive either.

Those actual CDC buildings look very...sterile.

Nice clay ones, though.