So this was quite an adventure. I say was; it still continues to be.
I finally got some time to invest in building my game board.
The plan was, and still is, to build a modular (ish) 6ft by 4 ft gaming board, made from 2ft by 2ft squares of MDF. The board will have an urban theme.
I'll kind of do it step by step for those that might want use my experiences to help them build their own gaming board. 'Cus I'm nice like that...
Enough lies. Onward!
Step 1. PLAN: Think, Design, Experiment. Rinse and Repeat.
Yup. Boring as it sounds I spent days just thinking about how to do this thing, experimenting with materials, glues and designing bits and bobs.
I'll break down some of the motions I went through to show you what I mean.
Modular design: The answer that produces ever increasing amounts of questions.
Making a modular board brings a whole heap of problems to the surface.
Principally what kind of features should it have, where should they be positioned, and how will this affect the modular nature of the board.
I'll tackle them here in the order I did.
Features:
Obviously, the first thing to think about is how you want your board to look.
Personally I want a board you could swap and change around. The most customisable board would just be 6 blank squares of greyish emptiness... But who wants that? really?
So I decided I wanted to add some permanent features to the board. Not only would these have to fit in with the urban theme of my board, they would also have to be simple, generic and quite flat.
This would allow easy transport and storage, and would make swapping other terrain features around much simpler.
Q. What to have?
A. What says city more than traffic?
I wasn't about to have abandoned cars, but roads!.
I did consider removable roads, but in my honest opinion, the roads I saw while researching this project were either unconvincing, or tacky (I'm looking at you Games Workshop!).
This brings up many questions, such as shape and size and so on.
More planning then?
How wide?
This turned out to be fairly straight forward to be honest. (I guessed it and was fairly happy with how it turned out
).As I pointed out earlier I want my urban board to feel..well..urban. Not just a featureless, blank battle ground, but to actually have urban features.
A such I decided I wanted my roads to have pavements, ya'know, like real roads in a real urban environment.
Most pavements around where I live have enough room for two people to walk down, with a little room between them, and either side.
The same principle applies to cars on most roads.
I know this sounds a little obvious, but that is essentially how I got my road and pavement size.
I put 2 Dreadnought/Land speeder basses next to each other and measured their combined width (adding a little for extra room and to make a round number).
I came out with 5 inches.
For the later I put 2 Space Marines next to each other and did the same. It was a bit of a weird number...but close enough to 2.5
inches.
Round enough number? Yup!
The foreseeable problem would be when someone put something like a landrai..NOPE! NOT ONE! ;)
Checked it with a drop pod too!
It actually turned out so much better than I expected! ha-ha.
Position.
But the size of the roads posed a new problem; Terrain.
Depending on where I put the road would directly affect the space I would have for terrain features on the board.
While the solution turned out quite straightforward in the end there were many factors to take into account; Modular nature of board, space for terrain.
For example. To maximise the space on the square I would have to move the road closer to one board edge than the other. This meant sacrificing the modular nature of the board; there would be far less 'natural' configuration... especially when connecting to other roads.
The only way to keep it modular would be to make sure all roads connected to at least 1, if not 2, edges of the square they were to be modelled in.
That meant sticking the road right down the middle of the square.
Luckily this meant there would be plenty of room either side for terrain
Board layout.
I've been banging on about 'the modular nature of the board,' but what exactly does that mean?
For those who are unfamiliar with 'modular' things, it is essentially pieces that can be changed around depending on how you want to make something look. In the case of the board it means that it has the ability for numerous different configurations.
An example for instance is that I can have a road network running through the middle of a city in one game, and then for the next game I can have a solid urban block on one side of the board, width he road network on the other.
In this context, what was to be on the gaming squares was obviously very important. 6 blank pieces would be boring and hard to fill with terrain without looking like a confused mess. While being modular, it needed order.
I had already decided I wanted roads, indeed, I had already planned them out in previous planning stages.
Two questions arose; how many? and what type?
For this I needed to see how many customisable options I could get out of my boards.
The easiest way to do this would be on some form of CAD programme... but I don't have one, and to be honest, you don't need one.
I drew 6 scaled down squares onto pieces of paper, and cut them out. I then drew the features I wanted on to the squares and chopped and changed them.
My first configuration was 3 blank tiles and 3 straight roads.
This meant there could be 3 unique combinations when put together. I felt that this number was very limiting. In addition, no matter the configuration, there would be a lot of interconnected wide open spaces, which defied the principle of a modular urban board (i.e.: being able to choose if you want open ground or a built up city).
My next configuration was 3 blank tiles, 2 Straight roads and a T-Junction/Crossroad.
This configuration added another unique combination, the trade off was that only a small number of combinations looked natural; roads ending going nowhere. It was the problem the first configuration had, but a lot more noticeable (cross roads in the middle of nowhere O_o).
By this point I had decided that any more than 4 'feature' tiles would probably detract from the space required by additional terrain (I put the sky shield on a board piece, and man that thing takes up a lot of room!).
So I went at it again.
This last configuration turned out to be my favourite; 3 blank tiles, 2 straight roads and 1 'bend.'
At first I thought this would have the same issue the crossroads did, however, I managed to clock up almost double the amount of unique configurations... most of which didn't look terrible either. Here is a couple of the bets ones;
We had a winner!
Next time around I'll actually be building things!
I KNOW?!?! PROGRESS!!
Thanks for reading
-DH-
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