Making a Gaming Board: Part 3

So, I promised some progress, and there is some!

After the disaster class of the last post I wanted to show off the ideas for the insides of the other boxes.

While one has been permanently given over to being a sort of cave/mining area due to the paper mache, I still have three completely empty boxes which need something inside them.

Rather than make another permanent change to one of the boxes I’m gonna keep things a bit more modular with the other three, that way I can have different things depending on what mood/game I’m playing.

Turns out that the walls and doors from “Killteam: Into the Dark” fit nicely inside the boxes, there is a bit of a gap at the edges but that’s easily dealt with as you’ll see.

Into the Dark Walls Test fitting the “Into the Dark” walls

I spent many hours watching YouTube videos for inspiration, and eventually found this video by MidWinter Minis which had a great little process for making “concrete flooring”.

Grab a piece of coarse sandpaper, chop it into squares, glue the squares to some cardboard, then paint em. Super simple!

Sandpaper Floor Tiles My sandpaper flooring

You’ll notice that I’ve not pushed the tiles right up to the edge of the cardboard. That’s because I actually used a ruler to measure the gap between the “Into the Dark” walls and the edge of the box (I know, pretty advanced stuff). Worked out if I “removed” 1.6cm from each side the walls would fit with a nice small gap and make it so that nobody could just walk around the side of any of the walls. (Side note: there are so many walls in that set! They don’t all fit)

Base coat Primed tiles with Halfords Grey

Primed both sides of the cardboard with Halfords Grey and threw a cast iron weight on top to prevent any curling issues. Got a tiny little bit, but nothing the weight of the walls won’t correct.

Painting the tiles

The painting process was fairly simple. The black/brown paint is a really cheap mixture of acrylic paints (black, red and green) which I watered down (with water) and then just dribbled over the tiles randomly.

The bits of green you see are Citadel Technical “Tesseract Glow”, used a lot less of that but similar process, just kinda slapped it around.

Then I grabbed a big paint brush and just dragged the paint all over in random directions.

Looking good! Looking filthy <3

The plan now is to create some side walls using either XPS or cardboard to push out the sides by 1.6cm, maybe put some LEDs in as well!

I also picked up a load of XPS foam bricks.

BRICKS MANY BRICKS

XPS Foam Bricks Testing XPS Brick placement

I’ve not glued these down yet, as I said I’m hesitant to make any more permanent changes to a box, so these will likely be glued to card in a similar style to the sandpaper tiles. This area is going to be a Dungeon/Sewer/Prison/Arena area with modular bits that can be dropped in and out for different games.

The bricks look amazing already though, and sitting on the floor placing those bricks was a truly zen experience.

So I have one box left to fill

- Caves/Mining Area
- Into the Dark/Industrial Area
- Dungeon/Sewer/Prison/Arena Area (the bricks)
- ????

Next up on the TODO list (box wise) is to seal any gaps in the sides with wood filler, and then get them painted in a nice dark colour.

We’re now caught up to present day (all of this work was done before I even started this blog), I’ve not done the next bits, so Making a Gaming Board: Part 4 will likely take a little bit longer unless I make some good progress this weekend. We shall see how things go.

Just as a quick aside, I’ve got about 15 posts relating to various hobby related things, so stay tuned for those in the mean time :D