15th June 2024: I'm Getting Very Board
Despite all of the wargaming terrain I've made over the years, I've never actually made my own proper gaming table. In fact, for well over 20 years, I've used 4 boards of completely different thicknesses, all with a badly glued down GW static grass sheet on top.
This has always bothered me, as it's always so obvious where the boards meet.
I thought it was about time I did something about this, and resolved myself to actually constructing a decent gaming space.
Unfortunately, the project has been hampered by a complete lack of experience, a multitude of decision changes, an enormous underestimation of how long this would take, and the complete and total lack of space required in order to accomplish such a mission.
This is how things have gone so far...
I first picked up some pretty cheap and naff wood to act as a base. I picked up 3 sheets of 2' by 4', and cut one longways down the middle. This wood is the same thickness as one of my existing boards, so the plan is to eventually retrofit the old board so that it will fit in with the new ones.
This will give me a multitude of different board combinations to use, with 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 foot wide tables available.
As the edges of the wood were very rough, I decided to rub some filler in there and give it a basic sand, so that it was easier to handle, and would look a lot nicer when painted. This has so far been about the only thing that has gone well.
As I look back, the most foolish decision I made was the very first one. I'd got some 6mm and 9mm polystyrene sheets from other projects in the past. The initial idea was to glue this to the wood in different areas to have 2 slightly different heights forming the basic tabletop.
However, as this was polystyrene, I knew I'd need some fancy method to keep it protected from damage.
I really should have just used some thin wood all over. What an idiot I am.
As I'd watched some Youtube terrain videos, and thought myself just as good as those guys, my first idea was to make up some home made modelling compound and completely cover all of the boards in this, to make them very hard wearing.
This would need shredding up a lot of toilet paper, and would require a lot of casting powder. Now, as shown a little while back, the casting powder I received was delivered by a wonderful Amazon driver, and the tub was split straight down the side. I managed to dispense this into an empty cement tub I'd luckily got in the shed.
As I started to glue the polystyrene to the wood, I thought that I needed to have some method of protecting the edges. To this end, I left a little gap, not taking the polystyrene to the edges. I figured I'd fill it in with modelling compound to firm it all up later. When a couple of days had gone by, I wondered what the hell my brain was doing, and realised I should have just trimmed the boards with thin wood. This meant I had to cut back and remove a little polystyrene. Luckily, the glue I'd bought wasn't super strong and I was able to peel and scrape it away.
I mixed up the modelling compound and started to add it to the joins between the different types of polystyrene, trying to smooth these out. This is when I learned that the modelling compound technique takes forever. The damn stuff sets so fast that you simply can't mix a big load and slap it all on, or it will be set before you can push it and smooth it into the correct positions.
I struggled on through the poly joins, mixing tiny little amounts of compound at a time, but my mind was already made up that this stuff was not going all over.
So I had a different idea. I chose a test area of one of the boards, and using a sieve, I gently scattered casting powder over it. Then I sprayed it down with a misting of water, before laying sheets of toilet paper on top. Then I scattered some more casting powder on top, and sprayed it down again. Then, when it started to set, I wet my fingers and smoothed it out as best I could.
This worked to a degree. Yet though it was a lot faster, it still took a long time, particularly the smoothing out part. The final nail in the coffin of this idea, is that the area did not set flat, even after all my efforts with the smoothing. There were all these lumps and ridges that just did not look natural at all.
Though I wasn't happy with that technique for the large flat areas of land, it did look like it might work for the river section, especially if I painted it right. Therefore I went ahead and covered the river bed using this method.
By this point, I was rapidly running out of time, and wouldn't have the space for much longer before the boards would need to be moved. One morning I randomly woke up at 3:15 AM and panicked so much that I jumped out of bed and started painting the boards green. Just to do something.
For some reason, it took me over 3 hours just to paint the tops of the boards. With just a few days left, this was the point I realised I'd made a massive tactical error thinking I could possibly pull this off. I really should never have bothered. I just saw people on Youtube making awesome looking boards and had the absolute gall to believe I could do something similar in the time I had available.
Still, I needed to get as much done as possible now that I was neck deep in it.
Now that the boards were green, I could see a lot of dips and divets that were not as obvious before. I used the last of my tube of wood filler to smooth these out as best I could, and then finished these areas in green also.
I then bought some heavy duty varnish and slapped this on top. I was hoping that, along with the glue and flock that would come later, it would be enough to protect the polystyrene from some wear. But after the varnish, it all still felt really fragile somehow. I knew I needed something else.
Yet more Youtube vids were scoured, and I saw a lot of people use tile grout to make very hard, and somewhat natural looking, ground for their game boards. So off I went to the local DIY store, and grabbed some grout and some soil to mix it with. Firstly, the soil had to be baked and sieved so that it went into a very clean and dry powder.
I picked one of the smaller boards, and glued the grout and soil mix down on top. Then, as instructed, I wet the surface with some isopropyl alcohol, before dousing it with sealer.
A day later, I was assuming I would have a very hard, and pretty cool looking surface. Instead, I ended up with a really odd coloured ground, that flakes off pretty easily if you so much as tickle it with your fingers, with several larger chunks breaking up and falling off.
Sigh.
Things have simply not gone well during this entire venture. And with the space I was using no longer available, the boards are stuck up the corner again until I can find somewhere (and somehow) to try and finish them off.