Creating your own wargaming table is more than just building a surface to play on; it’s about crafting a world. When dice roll and miniatures move across a landscape you’ve painstakingly brought to life, the game transcends simple mechanics. It becomes an immersive narrative, a story unfolding on a stage of your own making. From the foundational boards to the smallest scatter terrain, every element plays a part in building that atmosphere. Let’s dive into the key components: modular tables, hills, rivers, buildings, and the miniatures that inhabit them.
The Foundation: Modular Gaming Tables
Why go modular? The simple answer is flexibility and practicality. A full 6×4 foot board is cumbersome to store and transport. Breaking it down into smaller sections, typically 2×2 or 1×1 foot squares, solves these problems instantly. Imagine being able to rearrange your battlefield completely for each game, shifting terrain modules to create entirely new tactical challenges. One game might feature a dense forest corner, the next a sprawling urban ruin, all using the same basic set of tiles.
Common materials for these modules include Medium Density Fibreboard (MDF), rigid insulation foam (like XPS foam), or even sturdy plywood. MDF offers excellent durability and a perfectly flat surface but can be heavy. Insulation foam is incredibly lightweight and easy to carve, making it ideal for integrated basic contours, but it needs protection around the edges to prevent damage. Plywood strikes a balance but might require more finishing work.
Creating the modules often involves cutting the base material to size accurately. For foam boards, ensuring clean, straight edges is crucial for a good fit. Some hobbyists create interlocking edges using jigsaws or specialised cutters, while others rely on simple butt joints, perhaps reinforced with magnets or dowels underneath for alignment. Once the base structure is solid, the real fun begins: texturing. PVA glue mixed with sand, tile grout, or modelling pastes can create realistic ground cover. Painting follows, usually starting with a dark base coat, followed by successively lighter dry brushes to pick out the texture and add depth.
Raising the Stakes: Crafting Hills and Elevation
Flat battlefields are boring! Hills break up sight lines, provide cover, offer vantage points for shooters, and create natural choke points. They add a vital third dimension to your games. The undisputed king of hill-making material is extruded polystyrene foam (XPS), often found as insulation boards in DIY stores. It’s dense, lightweight, doesn’t crumble like white packaging foam (EPS), and can be easily shaped.
Shaping can be done with various tools. A sharp craft knife or utility knife is essential for basic cuts. For more organic curves and slopes, a hot wire cutter is invaluable, slicing through the foam like butter (just ensure good ventilation!). You can stack layers of foam, gluing them together with foam-safe adhesive (solvent-based glues will melt it!), and then carve the stack into a single landform. Sandpaper helps smooth out rough edges, though sometimes a rougher, rockier look is desired.
Once shaped, hills need texturing just like the base boards. A coat of PVA glue followed by sand and small grit provides a base layer. Adding patches of modelling flock or static grass brings them to life. Small rocks or cork bark fragments can simulate rocky outcrops. Painting typically involves a dark base coat (browns, greys), followed by washes to settle into the recesses and define shadows, and then dry brushing with lighter tones to highlight the raised areas and textures. Remember to seal the foam with a layer of PVA glue or non-solvent based primer before spray painting, as aerosols can dissolve the foam.
Carving Paths: Integrating Rivers and Water Features
Rivers act as significant tactical features. They can channel movement, block vehicles, provide cover along their banks, and serve as objectives. Creating realistic water features adds another layer of visual appeal and strategic depth to your table.
There are two main approaches: carving the river directly into your base modules or creating separate river sections. Carving into foam boards allows for integrated banks and a seamless look but commits that module to having a river. Separate sections, often made from thin MDF, plasticard, or even sturdy card, offer more modularity – you can place the river wherever you like. These sections are built up with banks made from foam, cork, or modelling clay.
The riverbed itself should be painted before adding any ‘water’. Use earthy tones, perhaps blending greens and blues where the water would be deeper. Add pebbles, sand, and maybe some simulated weeds. For the water effect itself, several options exist. Multiple thin layers of PVA glue can work for shallow water but can shrink and crack. Gloss varnish or Mod Podge creates a surface shine. The most realistic, but often trickiest, results come from using two-part epoxy resins or specific water effect products. These require careful mixing and pouring, and often take time to cure fully.
Safety First! When working with tools like hot wire foam cutters, craft knives, or chemical resins, always prioritize safety. Ensure good ventilation, especially with hot wires and resins, as fumes can be harmful. Wear appropriate eye protection when cutting or sanding, and use gloves when handling resins or strong adhesives. Always follow the manufacturer’s instructions for tools and materials.
Don’t forget details like small bridges (scratch-built from craft sticks or part of a kit), stepping stones, or fallen logs across the water to enhance realism and provide crossing points.
Building the Scene: Structures and Buildings
Buildings are essential for many wargames, especially those set in urban or sci-fi environments. They provide hard cover, block line of sight entirely, create multi-level fighting opportunities, and often serve as crucial objectives. Whether you’re creating ruined gothic cathedrals, desert adobe huts, or futuristic hab-blocks, buildings add character and tactical complexity.
You can buy pre-made kits (MDF, plastic, or resin), which offer detail and convenience, or you can scratch-build your own. Scratch-building allows for complete customization and can be very cost-effective. Excellent materials include:
- Foamcore: Lightweight, easy to cut, great for basic structures. Peel off the paper layers for easy texturing.
- Cardboard: Cereal boxes and packing boxes are readily available. Corrugated card can simulate metal sheeting.
- Plasticard: Thin sheets of plastic, great for smooth surfaces, details, and sci-fi panels.
- XPS Foam: Can be carved into stone walls or damaged sections.
- Balsa Wood / Craft Sticks: Ideal for timber framing, planking, fences, and details.
When building, think about scale and functionality. Do you need interiors? Removable roofs or floors for access? How tall should the building be relative to your miniatures? Adding details makes a huge difference: windows (cut out or just painted on), doors, drainpipes (made from plastic tubing or straws), bullet holes, scorch marks, and rubble piles for ruined structures. Texturing walls with sand mixed in paint, or using textured paints, adds realism. Painting follows similar principles to terrain: base coats, washes for shadows and grime, dry brushing for highlights, and specific techniques for weathering like rust streaks or moss effects.
Populating the World: Miniatures and Scatter Terrain
Your beautifully crafted table is the stage; the miniatures are the actors. While painting miniatures is a whole hobby in itself, ensuring their bases match the terrain style ties everything together visually. A figure based with desert sand will look out of place on a lush jungle board. Consistent basing across your army and terrain is key to cohesion.
Beyond the main features, scatter terrain adds granular detail and tactical nuance. These are the smaller, often movable elements that fill the spaces between larger pieces. Examples include:
- Crates and barrels
- Fences and walls
- Trees and bushes (individual or small clumps)
- Ruined vehicle parts
- Ammo dumps
- Signposts
- Small rocky outcrops
Scatter provides low cover, breaks up movement lanes, and makes the battlefield feel lived-in and dynamic. It can be made from anything – offcuts of foam, cork bark, plastic bits from kits, household junk (greeblies!), or dedicated scatter terrain kits. Even simple pieces, when painted and weathered consistently with the rest of the table, add significant visual interest.
Tying It All Together: Theme and Immersion
The final step is ensuring all these elements – table modules, hills, rivers, buildings, scatter, and miniature bases – work together to create a cohesive whole. Decide on a theme early on. Is it a temperate forest, an arid desert, a frozen tundra, a war-torn city, or an alien jungle? This theme will guide your choices in materials, colours, and types of features.
Use a consistent colour palette across all elements. Earth tones, greens, and greys are common starting points, but adapt them to your chosen environment. Ensure your texturing materials (sand, flock, static grass) are used consistently. A building plopped onto a grassy field needs some groundwork around its base to blend it in – perhaps some gravel, mud, or overgrown weeds climbing the walls.
Building wargaming terrain is a journey, often involving trial and error, but the reward is immense. Seeing players strategize over a river crossing you crafted, take cover behind walls you built, or fight for control of a hill you sculpted provides a unique satisfaction. It elevates the gaming experience from abstract movement on a flat plane to a tactical puzzle within a miniature world.
