Bartertown.com

Greetings all.

Am considering building a war gaming tabletop and am looking for some ideas out there... Just curious what has worked, what hasn't... pics would be great to share some ideas! I usually play 15mm WWII games but I think there is a lot to learn from other gamers outside the WWII genre as well... what kind of terrain do you have? What works? Fixed or moveable?

I'm thinking about a 4x8 or 4x6 table... maybe made out of three 2x4 ft sections... something that would allow us to change up the battlefield in a number of different combinations... or do you just throw the sheet over the kitchen table and hope things don't slide? That's what we've been doing! So, maybe it's time to go with something a little more... ummm... serious...

I'm new to Bartertown but I like the feel of the community (and I'm currently in the middle of my first trade) so thanks in advance for sharing your insights and photos!

I'd suggest 2x2 sections: they're easier to store and provide more options.

Anything smaller, and I feel like it's a bit too small, and my one 2x4 section is a bit unwieldy: it pretty much dictates a big chunk of the battlefield.

edit: actually, something I just thought of is 16" squares would probably be perfect for 4x4, with the occasional 16x32" square. I may need to try this configuration. One advantage is that many systems work off of 6/12" measurements, so 16 would be harder to measure against.

This is a table I built a year or so ago... Not sure of its exact size but it covered my kitchen table. Came out real nice and was so fun to build. I ended up trading it on craigslist for about $300 worth of 40K. Looking forward to my next table build... thinking of doing a old run down temple/jungle theme for my Tau.

One of the guys by me created an entire city when the "Cityfight" rules came out for Warhammer 40k by using 12 x 12 floor tiles.

24 of these tiles gave us a endless supply of city layout options.

He kept the buildings 4" in from all sides so when they were butted together they would form a 1" sidewalk and a 6" road/alley.

I'll see if I can find any photos of it for a reference.

Scott

I normally set mine up on 1/8" x'x4' Masonite boards. Then glue the foam down so you can make whatever interesting terrain you want. This works well, especially if you want to be able to change things up or store them. Try as you might, you will still see "seams". I do play Flames of War as well, but for that we tend to use play mats and drop hills and buildings and such on top of it, instead of making custom boards.

Here are some of the tables I have done:


Gallery: http://s205.photobucket.com/albums/bb40 ... 12-9-2008/


Gallery: http://s205.photobucket.com/albums/bb40 ... 9-01-2009/


Gallery: http://s205.photobucket.com/albums/bb40 ... tTheGates/

Azbag#1 wrote:One of the guys by me created an entire city when the "Cityfight" rules came out for Warhammer 40k by using 12 x 12 floor tiles.

24 of these tiles gave us a endless supply of city layout options.

He kept the buildings 4" in from all sides so when they were butted together they would form a 1" sidewalk and a 6" road/alley.

I'll see if I can find any photos of it for a reference.

Scott

I'd really like to see this.

Azbag#1 wrote:One of the guys by me created an entire city when the "Cityfight" rules came out for Warhammer 40k by using 12 x 12 floor tiles.

24 of these tiles gave us a endless supply of city layout options.

He kept the buildings 4" in from all sides so when they were butted together they would form a 1" sidewalk and a 6" road/alley.

I'll see if I can find any photos of it for a reference.

Scott

Just curious if you ever found photos of this? Sounds interesting and would like to see pics if you have them! Thank you.

Sorry, but I was never able to find the photos. The system we used for all of our photos crashed and we were not able to recover any of the photos since the last back up. I'll see if he still has some laying around but I highly doubt it.

Scott

All I have is a 4 x 8 foot sheet of OSB that I painted with a medium green latex mistint. All the terrain I have is separate and thus can be re-arranged from one game to the next, and added to as I see fit.

On the other side, I'd like to glue fine decorator sand (from a dollar store naturally) to the whole surface and paint it with a gray mistint.

Why mistints? They're cheap sources of good latex paint.

This is the video of the table I built from scratch at my home. It turned out pretty well, I just need to build the borders around the edge to stop the plaster from chipping, but other than that it works out just fine. The texture was done with a mixture of plaster of paris and silicone caulking, the roads were done with foamboard and the craters are paper mache over little pieces of foam so the crater stands out. Hope this is at all helpful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCnYcNY7xuA

I know this is from an old post but how did you make the cracked asphalt? It looks really good.

I'd start off with a stable base table to add your scenery too like this:







and you could add any type of scenery on top for whatever you need, if playing 40K towers/ silos like these are always good:

I do not have any pictures, but an old article in the wargamers digest suggested how to do tiles.

1. 4-8 L shaped tiles
2. 2-4 squares
3. 2-4 T shaped tiles

Draw them on graph paper: No more than 8' per short edge and 16" per long edge in practice, but you can scale down your puzzle pieces 4:1. After cutting them out in paper, you can have fun fitting them onto a square or rectangle sized table. After you see how they configure/work in practice, then you can decide how you want to terrain them. The possibilities though not infinite are considerable. Once the mental lightbulb goes off, you can design the tiles with roads, lakes or rivers going through the middle of the tile and forests, orchards, hills, towns, cities, etc. located anywhere else on the tiles. Personally, I would prefer to place the elevated portions on portable minitiles, say 4' x1", 4" x 2", 4" x 3", 4" x 4", etc.

I'm doing something similar, with a number of 1x1' and 2x1' squares, with some scatter terrain to break things up.

Hills have been pretty organic; never gotten rivers to work in a way other than counting them as open (i.e. shallow) since they're bulky and make huge lines of terrain.