This post summarizes what I call Felt-on-Styrofoam. I think it is easiest and best based on the cost and effort invested for a diorama look resulting. It maximizes GROI, Gamer Return On Investment. You be the judge of whether the balance does result in the easiest and best.
While modular seems like a way to repurpose terrain, that approach may be more work in practice. Modular is less flexible and requires a lot of constant modeling of unique features. Bruce Weigel’s exquisite single-purpose (or custom) terrain is spectacular but more work and lots of storage space.
Felt-on-Styrofoam
This terrain approach is described in more detail in the Terrain category’s posts. It is the most straightforward, fastest, most flexible, and least-constrained terrain. This terrain approach balances a lot of the trade-offs that occur with other approaches. Here’s a summary:
- Blank felt over styrofoam zero-terrain layer with styrofoam hill levels sandwiched. I prefer an olive-colored felt over Kelly Green or make a mottled felt, starting with a tan felt and green spray cans. Maybe sparingly use a green “granite” variety to add texture.
- Trees can be poked thru the felt (that heals readily) and planted anywhere. Individual trees can define the outline of a forest precisely. Then a few trees and lichen can fill in the expanse of the forest, and players can push aside the lichen as troops set up or move through the woods.
- Roads can be made with either 1/4″ wide tan or black masking tape or sprinkled* model railroad ballast (comes in various colors for various road types). Cleaned up and re-used for future games. Can any complexity of road network quickly.
- Ditto rivers made of blue glitter*. Can model any shape.
- Towns may take special handling depending on the rule system. One can make building templates (yards!) to place under individual buildings, which players can remove to expose spotted occupant stand(s). In Command Decision: Test of Battle, they standardize on two types of Built-Up Areas that are just cloth or felt templates that one could plop buildings on that players can push aside to expose spotted stands.
I provide two free e-books to describe Bruce Weigel’s exquisitely modeled terrain boards that are single-purpose and this felt-on-styrofoam approach enumerated above, click here.
*A light sprinkle looks better than heavy coverage, which is hard to make uniform.
Advantages:
- This terrain style can be used to model any map closely.
- Modular terrain presents constant trade-offs where features aren’t quite right but will have to do. Or made specially.
- The ridges and hill contours can even be returned to the styrofoam they are cut from, taped back in with duct tape, then be re-used.
- The reusable aspects of this terrain make this approach both flexible and less expensive than single-purpose or even modular, which requires a certain amount of special modeling to have “enough”.
- It also avoids the straight-line breaks between the modules.
- Likewise, avoid the break between zero-level and added hill contours. The felt “softens” the transition between contours, yet the precise contour edges are easily detectable. This precision is important in some game systems’ modifiers that is a problem with single-purpose terrain or sand tables.
- Compared to the overall modeling time of single-purpose or modular terrain, it takes less time.
- Requires less storage certainly than single-purpose terrain and likewise as modular terrain is added, more storage is required. Each of these approaches may be delicate to store and prone to gathering dust in storage. Felt can be rolled up, thus protected from dust and damage. The underlying styrofoam can be banged up and damaged without ruining the look (may even improve the looks!)
Adapting for a Convention
A drawback of the felt-on-styrofoam approach is that it would need to be adapted if your plan is to take the terrain to convention partly finished. This drawback is similar to Bruce Weigel’s single-purpose approach because his board is fully built. Both can work if you have a van that will fit a giant board.
Without needing a van to transport it, one could cut the base styrofoam into three hinged pieces. So, for example, a 4×6′ board could be cut into (3) 2×4′ pieces. Or 4×8′ into (3) 32×48″ sections. Hinge two pieces with duct tape, then hinge that assembly to the remaining 2×4′ piece on the reverse side. It will fold up into a 1.5″ thick (assuming 1/2″ styrofoam) 2×4′ piece. You set up before travel by pinning down the hill contours on two outer sections. Then on arrival at the con, pin on the other hill contours for the center section, place the felt over the board. Finish setting up the rest of the terrain.
Laying a complex road network is the next challenge. The more complex it is, the more time it will take and you may not have much time at the con.
Note: Hex terrain is also modular terrain, but probably requires even more cost, time overall, and modeling skill to produce enough of it and make up each game table. It exacerbates some of disadvantages of larger square modules.
The featured image
The image at the top of the page is from my free e-book. It shows a fairly complex terrain with lots of contours. So I “bush-pinned” the edges of those contours. Obviously, one could not easily model this battle (Second Bull Run) with modular terrain.
Most terrain is less complex than this example, and the transition between fewer contours and zero-level does not require pinning.
Notice that I had roller-painted the styrofoam green because my earlier felts were so thin that one can see the pink or blue styrofoam through the felt!
See my posts’ free e-books and terrain category for more details. The styrofoam-on-felt e-book is called Making Wargame Terrain (MWT, it comes in a smaller, screen-ready version plus a larger-resolution, print-ready version.) The second e-book is about Bruce Weigel’s Custom Terrain Building.
Below is another image from the free e-book, the game in progress. The hill contour edges are not pronounced but are very noticeable when standing at the table.
The roads look rather messy. (Like thousands of soldiers have marched through the dirt roads!) But I have thought about making a better tool than my double-U road gizmo. Mainly with taller outer edges.
Shopping List
- Styrofoam, say 1/2″ thick, usually comes in 4×8′ sheets
- Felt
- Yardstick or big T-Square to draw a grid on the styrofoam
- Magic Marker to draw contours on styrofoam to be cut out, compared to the map that you’ve gridded
- Utility Knife*
- Duct Tape
- Pins
- Glitter for rivers (I dispense mine from an Italian Seasonings shaker bottle!)
- Model Railroad Ballast for roads or 1/4″ wide Masking Tape
- Road tool (see page 11 of the MWT e-book)
- Dustbuster, small vacuum
- Pins, various (longer than styrofoam is thick with big heads, or shorter with lichen bush added)
- Felt or cloth for Built-Up Area templates
- See below for Forest ideas
*On the Facebook group 6mm Wargaming & Terrain, Tom Dye, in a comment, suggests cutting the contours at an angle rather than how I did at 90 degrees. This might produce a more natural-looking slope. “It’s possible to do with either a styrofoam cutter hot wire or serrated knife at an angle.” This is a good suggestion that’s worth a test to see how it looks. Admittedly I am less a modeler and instead more a “gamer.” So I hadn’t thought of how to make the contours look better. I suppose one could carve ravines and other irregularities to break up the contour edge. Then when done with the game, one could still tape this back into the styrofoam to recycle it. I don’t have a styrofoam cutter, but one can find one online or perhaps at a craft store locally.
Forest
Woods can be modeled in a variety of ways. Part of the issue is the scale.
The MWT book shows terrain for a 3mm game where I made a lot of 2×2″ forest blocks. The base was 2mm thick brown “Foamies” material that was easy to cut out. I also made narrow blocks 1×2″ for tree lines and triangles. The foliage was made from pillow stuffings dyed and sprayed green. I didn’t make rounded sections because many maps I’ve seen had forests adjacent to cleared fields that were based on a straight boundary line. In the end, some of the forests I made looked rounded anyway.
One can add more foliage if one can find a bumpy material that’s easy to cut. A green carpet sounds like a good idea, but it would be difficult to cut it into pieces.
For 6mm or larger troops, I like to delineate forest edges by “planting” individual trees. One can buy ready-made trees on a peg for the trunk. If the peg is small enough, one can poke through the felt. Or make DIY tree trunks from twigs with a pin glued in or adjacent. Glue lichen to the top. These stick through the felt easily. Then fill up the forest’s interior with a few more individual trees and lichen.
Rises & Crests
Command Decision: Test of Battle has a terrain concept called rises. This represents a gentle slope that interrupts the line of sight. For 3-6mm, I have modeled these with 3mm or 6mm thick Foamies. Typically I cut these in narrow strips. A stand must be on or adjacent to the rise to avoid the LOS being blocked.
These can also represent hill crests of what would otherwise look like a plateau. Or you can dispense with marking the crest by saying the center of the top contour is the crest.
I have placed them on top of the felt where they are more obvious. However, if thick enough (like 6mm) but noticeably less than the contour’s thickness (1/2″ or more), then they may be visible enough.
Terrain Key
I have noticed a frequently asked question on the BattleGroup Facebook group about how hedges and other ambiguous terrain affect Line of Sight. The usual response from experienced players is, “it depends on what your group agrees at the start of the game.” Even then, hedges could change from game to game. For example, too low to provide concealment, or Norman Hedgerows that provide both concealment and cover.
With CD: TOB, I made up a Terrain Key, a Terrain Effects Chart, showing how terrain affected several aspects: LOS, movement, morale, combat, and miscellaneous. You can see that in the #8 play aid in this link. I compiled the effects from the rulebook and entered them in a FileMaker Pro database. One could click which terrain items were present on the board and print out a subset of the whole listing of terrain items and their effect. A snippet of the TEC key is below:
Towns
Towns may take special handling depending on the rule system. One can make individual building templates (could be modeled to look like yards!) to place under individual buildings, which players can remove to expose spotted occupant stand(s). This is more of a skirmish approach. Because of scale in typical games, a building model would represent a building block. See the next paragraph for modeling a group of buildings, a Built-Up Area.
In Command Decision: Test of Battle, they standardize on two types of Built-Up Areas (BUA) that are just cloth or felt templates that one could plop buildings on that players can push aside to expose spotted stand occupants. The buildings are just decoration. Each BUA has five zones that can hold nine stands: a center zone (one stand maximum) and the remaining zones along the four edges of the square template (each holding two stands). Stands placed along an edge are in that zone, or a stand away from an edge is in the center zone. CD: TOB also has single-zone BUAs.
My friend made his scratch-built buildings to be pinned into the styrofoam. Since they are delicate, I don’t want to lift them up mid-game. So in a game, we declared that building occupants would be placed adjacent to the building when spotted. Here’s a photo:
For how to use terrain as “naturalistic markers,” click here.
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