Making a Gaming Board: Part 2

Part 2 of this series, is a tale of woe.

And a lesson that I learned so that you don’t have to!

In my quest to keep things to a relatively sane amount of money I decided that the inside of one of the boxes could be filled with paper mache, if you’ve ever worked with this stuff before you may know where this is headed.

Paper mache is just thin sheets of paper, newspaper is usually most folks go-to, covered in flour and water and left to set. Very simple stuff, dries rock hard, excellent for cheap crafting.

I sort of forgot how it worked, and that you’re supposed to lay a thin strip then cover it in paste, then lay a strip on top of that, and a strip on top of that… build it up slowly then you can shape it a bit more before it dries.

Instead of doing that very sensible thing, I decided to make a sort of paste and just mashed the paper into a bowl until I had this really thick grey goop (which is one heck of a workout, just as an aside). Armed with my grey goop I started slathering it onto the inside of my chosen box.

The Grey Goop

Grey goop being applied to the inside of the box, I’m oblivious to the pain I am inflicting on myself at this point

I made some paths, some “tunnel entrances” made a little hole that was going to be a puddle of resin at the end, I had big plans!

OK, so anyone who’s dealt with paper mache before is probably laughing, so my mistake is that you are supposed to do thin layers, you are not supposed to dollop whopping great lumps of the stuff all over a piece of wood that isn’t going to allow it to breathe and dry out otherwise it’ll start going mouldy.

The other issue I had is that it’s recommended to dry paper mache relatively quickly, one way to do it is to bake paper mache in the oven once it’s dried off a bit, which has the added bonus of killing off any potential bateria.

I didn’t do that, mostly because I don’t have an oven big enough for a 60x60cm wooden box to fit in. I did blast it with a hairdryer for a bit, and left it by the radiator with the heating on. Feeling pleased with my work (and oblivious to my mistakes), I left it overnight, came back the next morning and it was looking OK. Still damp in places but it had only been “a few hours”, so off to work I went.

Came back from work that night to check on the drying progress, I thought leaving it under the window with the sun shining on it would help, but it was still damp to the touch. “No worries” I thought, “should be sound by tomorrow”.

Next morning (so around 36 hours later) and the thicker parts are still moist to the touch, and now you mention it… yeah there is a bit of a strange smell coming from that corner of the room.

Come home from work that night and the smell hit me straight away, a mossy damp kinda smell. And that’s when I noticed the colour of parts of it beginning to change, specially in the corners and the thicker areas.

Paper Mache shouldn’t be yellow

It was at this moment, I knew, that I had f*****d up!

The next 48 hours consisted of my attempts to save my poor box using a hairdryer and a heat gun, which were partly successful, although I didn’t manage to save the original design of the edges, all that had to come out including the little support beams =’(

After my rescue attempts this is what it now looks like:

Shot of the saved board in all it’s paper mache glory

I don’t think it turned out too bad considering (and the texture is going to be amazing once painted), the lasting damage is the slight bowing that occured on the bottom of the box because of all the moisture. It’s not obvious when you look at it, but when you place it on a flat surface you can spin it round. All in all, not a complete disaster, and a lot of lessons learned. But man did I screw up!

Just as a quick aside, the paper mache, when used properly is actually going to be something I revisit in another project because it’s a great way to add texture to otherwise flat surfaces, it comes out with a natural rocky, cement-y sort of texture which is great for terrain making.

I’ve already started writing Gaming Board - Part 3 which should be out tomorrow, and that’s far more productive than this horror story, I actually make some decisions as to the inside of the other boards, and start work on some scatter terrain for the toppers.