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Board/tile basing materials

Tips and Tricks that don't quite fit into the above categories.

Board/tile basing materials

Postby iKarith » May 2nd, 2021, 5:34 am

For making boards and tiles … basing materials is an important question. If you want it to hold up it's gotta be pretty strong and solid, but the stronger and more solid materials are harder to cut, especially if you need to cut them with hand tools because you're in a studio apartment!

Here's a survey of the obvious and some not so obvious options:

Chipboard. A go-to. The originals are made with it, after all. But if you use an adhesive that isn't pretty low-moisture or suffers some shrinkage, it's going to warp. With time it might warp anyway, especially if you don't seal it, which involves coating it with something that's likely to warp it now. Graphics/framing chipboard is available in predictable thicknesses and dimensions, but it's also expensive.

3mm or 1/8" MDF or plywood. Might work for tiles, but too thin to be sturdy for larger pieces because of the nature of the material. MDF in this thickness is very breakable, I think I'd only use it as a base for something that didn't really NEED a base, but might benefit from added weight at the bottom. Even this thickness of MDF would murder carpet knife blades, but with a TON of patience and a lot of them, you could make some precision cuts through it. 3mm craft plywood won't kill your knife's blades so quickly and not require quite as much patience, but yeah.

6mm or 1/4" or thicker MDF, plywood, OSB, whatever. Needs power tools. Depending, fairly cheap material in big sheets. Kinda expensive pre-cut to smaller sizes or with higher quality than we need. Needs power tools for any kind of precision cut.

Foamcore. Thin and light for even board-sized bases. Can warp, especially if you start covering the paper in glues, paints, and sealants, but easier than chipboard to coat the stuff in ways that you KNOW will warp it and yet … not have it warp! Planning to coat it in mod podge? Lay out parchment paper that it won't stick to and paint both sides! If you wanna make sure, put more parchment paper over the top and put books down on the edges. Doesn't take much. Foamcore is relatively cheap. The issue for someone like me is getting it home without dinging the edges carrying it on public transit. Most of you won't have that many issues, but I might be wise to fashion a folio or something. Finished, sealed foamcore can have pretty strong edges, or they can be reinforced with craft wood strips from wherever you get dowels. The result is very light! Maybe too light.

Corrugated cardboard. :D Seriously though, it's got ALL of the disadvantages of chipboard and anything else made of effectively paper. It's relatively strong in one dimension, only moderately difficult to cut with precision with the simplest of tools (the corrugation is all that keeps it from being trivial) but it's REAL easy to argue with really, really cheap and maybe even free, especially for prototyping something you're going to build with more costly materials. If you want to use it because it's cheap and relatively light, cut two pieces and laminate them with cross-corrugation and strengthen the edges with strips of craft-cuttable wood. Seal the whole thing with a compound like mod podge and it's going to be REALLY solid and still damned cheap. If you're going to put something ON the result to cover the corrugations, this might be one of the most effective lightweight bases you can have, but it feels a little like you're trading your time for your money having to laminate everything, factor in wood strips to precise dimensions, possibly needing to seal the base before you can build upon it, etc. Oh, and cardboard is a bit floppy when you get to larger pieces no matter what you do, so it might not be ideal for something board-sized. And for tiles, if you need them thin, about the thinnest you're gonna get with corrugated is 3/16" (4-5mm) if you need to laminate the stuff. 1/4" is more likely, and 6mm is a big ask for a tile on a board, vs. a tile that makes a board, so it all depends on what you're trying to accomplish I guess?

XPS foam. Terrain builders swear by the stuff. They buy $120 foam cutting tables for it, and then import MDF guide fence replacements from Europe because the one that comes with it is a bit crap. You're probably not using this stuff for tiles, unless the tiles make a board (as WHQ or AHQ) but you might make a HQ board out of the stuff, it'll be an inch thick, you might want to put it on something else just because foam that large even sealed might get cracked if you're not a little careful, etc. It's good stuff. It has been used before and will be used again to make some very impressive pieces because it carves and seals well, and anywhere you can get the stuff from a big box hardware store, it's incredibly cheap in massive sheets. It can be textured with a ballpoint pen and a ball of foil, up to a couple inches can be carved with a couple of weights of utility knife (from your precision graphics utility knife or xacto on up to the carpet knife for hacking off big chunks of the thick stuff), can be cleanly severed with a zero-width cut like a hot knife through butter with … well, a hot wire :D … it's great really. In the EU it's even better because you can get this version of the stuff that's even easier to texture fine detail into.

But unless you want your board the thickness of the EU 1E box … it's not for board-making. Save it for furniture though! You could totally carve an alchemist's bench or sorcerer's table out of it, pretty easily! A throne would be pretty easy too (though I'd argue de-paper'ed foamcore would work better, but that's a very similar kind of foam, so … up to you. A stone throne for AtOH would be real easy. Tables too. The tomb, bookcases, etc will depend on your skulpting skills a little. GREAT for furniture. And you could make some great diorama quality AHQ and WHQ tiles with it … but in my opinion not good for HQ really.

That exhaust's the traditional options. Here's a couple more:

Vinyl flooring material. Available in 12" square tiles. Score and snap to cut. Often has a peel and stick adhesive. The hardware store will tell you to score the back snap it, then run the tip of your knife to cut the laminate sheet on the front. Flip that around: Score the front through the laminate, snap it, and then cut the peel-away adhesive backing. If you're making small tiles and you want stone and are lazy, just pick a stone-looking vinyl tile grid it up if you want a grid, then maybe spray it with a matte urethane. The adhesive will stick it down to some non-slip EVA foam which you can cut with a slight bevel inward so the tiles butt up against each other. Y'know, or you can not be so lazy and add a surface above the vinyl and create whatever you want, texture however you want, paint however you want… At a tile scale, it's perfect! Much bigger than about 6 inch square and it starts to get a little floppy by itself.

Other materials? I don't think I have a really good solution for something board-sized. A lot of sort of okay options, but nothing that just screams "I'm the solution!" when you start talking about things that can be 800-900mm long when people start using larger scales.

Coroplast. Big sheets of it can be bought at an art store if you have something like a Blick's where you can get it, but if you live in a house in a residential area in the US, you might be able to get a bunch of these cheap or free after an election. They're cheap, they're lightweight, they're waterproof, and they'll easily hold up for a campaign season! Thin 4mm stuff cuts with sturdy scissors, all of it cuts with a utility knife and a good straight edge. (careful that doesn't slide…) The issue is it's polypropylene so … what adhesives work? Scotch-Weld SF-100 is reported to if you cnean the surface, but that's NOT a cheap product! Believe it or not, I've heard that some people have actually resorted to tapes with really strong adhesives to make joins and give them a surface that'll hold paint. One person applied strips of gorilla tape to coat the surface, putty knifed the surface with wood filler to get something flat that'd take paint trivially, then painted the result to look like marble. A lot of work but it looked amazing and it held up!

Sintra … Is PVC foam. Think those plastic signs for room numbers and people's names in office type buildings. Score-and-snap cuts work well if the cut is deep enough on thick material, and it takes contact adhesives well if roughed up a bit. Mainly it can be treated a bit like plasticard but is available in a lot thicker pieces. I think Foamex is similar?
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Re: Board/tile basing materials

Postby Kurgan » May 2nd, 2021, 12:25 pm

Those are probably better ideas than the time I considered using actual ceramic tiles (those used for mosaics or even for flooring)! Balancing cost with durability and presentation is always a challenge.

I'm amazed still what people have been able to do with inexpensive and light materials though. Something fragile, big and heavy definitely presents a storage challenge. I don't have a big workshop at this time, so that's a big limitation for me right there. I keep all my HQ stuff in one of those long "under the bed" plastic boxes, other than the quests which I keep mostly in a couple of big plastic binders and a couple of plastic fishing boxes for the "bonus" miniatures (I keep the GS minis, KK minis an ROTWL minis each in their original boxes).

In my own case, I didn't get too carried away and just bought a few sheets of chip board from the local craft store (when I ran out of backs to notebooks and the backing board that came with my sheet protectors), glue stick and done, using laser printed paper. Not as fancy, of course. I've never tried to make my own board, but I see you can buy blank ones or having them professionally printed (I did the latter and was pleased with the results).


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