Kurgan wrote:Putting those values into BGM comes to $41.34 vs $37.03 (the price I paid for 25.4 mm squares).
Yes, though I went with the premium board, which added a lot to the cost. Don't know if the difference matters, but at the point when it's > $60, you start wondering if you can do something perhaps not cheaper, but more in line with what you'd actually want.
And what I'd actually want is probably a mixture of things, if I'm honest about it. I love that HQ is guaranteed to fit into a finite space. A 28x22 square board at 30mm per square is going to take a fair bit of space, but I know how much space it takes. But I also own AHQ and like that I can put together any kind of quest I can imagine with it.
If I can find a good place to order PVC card in relatively large sheets of a similar weight to credit cards, I know I can cut that without any fancy tools. Clamps, straight edge, a sharp blade, and patience. Cork cuts even easier. Cut squares shave the edges a little, and glue them to the plasticard. Cut patterns into the cork for different floor textures. What to do with them before paint depends a lot on how smooth the tiles are supposed to be. Then painting even I could do. And finally back with non-slip thin sponge rubber … the stuff they use to make desk mats and thin mouse pads. The tiles won't slide around on the table easily. Could even make a tile set that would assemble into a HQ board, though it might be a bit tedious to set up. The reason to do it would be to be able to replace rooms with expansion rooms trivially. The rubber backing means no need for anything to keep pieces in place.
You'll easily spend more on something like this than you would on a BGM board, but the cork and rubber are
cheap. Seems 0.030 styrene is cheap too, but is that gonna be rigid enough to protect the paint? I could go with 1/4" polycarbonate I suppose, I know that's thick enough, and it's no longer out of stock everywhere due to everybody who was kung flu fighting. (It's not the flu—I just call it that because some idiot tried to make it a crime to call it that.

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Kurgan wrote:Would be interesting to try to create a 3 fold board like Stephen Baker was talking about in those interviews. Then again if we're talking about actual number of squares, that means designing more complicated quests, to justify all that space. You could use higher quality materials, or even make it double sided like Dragon Strike. A board that costs as much as some whole games, I agree.
I can see wanting more squares, but simply bigger, inch squares will cover all the miniatures you could want to use. I have double square monsters, but that's just two squares. You can do an awful lot with the original board. The modular dungeon would be a much cheaper solution, but then you're going to possibly run into situations where the board goes all over the table and off the table, etc. unless you restrict that too.
My bigger board is for more squares—but not many more. 28x22, make all outside corridors 2 squares wide, and make the two horizontal central corridors 2 squares as well. The extra space prevents the single-file line behavior most games fall into, particularly if you also use wide doors. Given that, no single player (or monster) can block the doorway or most corridors.
Complicates tiles that cover the central room, which embiggens to be a 7x7 square, but since the only boards that have this problem are large scale custom boards, you just need to make custom tiles as well.
For an arbitrary 28x22 empty floorplan, yeah, the space is HUGE. Anything you want to put in it, you can. And yet, it will remain confined to a known size.
The idea for the slightly extended HQ board in 6 pieces as described above is that they'd be just about 13" x 12" … that shouldn't be too hard to find a box to fit. Of course, if you also want to fit furniture and minis, it'd have to be a pretty thick box. And if you wanna protect those minis they should be in foam trays … The box starts looking like a crate or … chest. And immediately you know what must be done with it!

<InSpectreRetro> All hail Zargon!!! Morcar only has 1BP.