I have been pretty open about the amount of terrain we are trying to plow through in order to ensure that the tables are the best quality possible for 2016 Masters. Sadly M seriously dislikes building terrain, so while I have been strongly suggesting spreading this work over 9 months, instead he decided to leave it all until 2 weeks out. This has meant that despite my strong assertions that I am not involved in the hobby side of the business, I have learnt a heck of a lot about table building in the last fortnight. So based on a suggestion from a community member, Jarrod, here are some thoughts on building your own table. (Before I start, M’s thoughts on table building are 1- don’t do it, 2- see if you can get someone else to do it, 3-leave it all until the last minute and see if you can procrastinate long enough that 1 or 2 become the best option). M’s response – we got it done though didn’t we!?!
The Table
So first things first you need is a board. Our events are all (to date) 40k so all our tables are 6’x4′ or 1.8mx1.2m. Unless you have a dedicated gaming room you need to think of where to store that board and how much it weighs. M’s second board was lovely, it was about an inch thick, it was textured and had a thick jarrah frame. In short it was so darn heavy it took 2 of us to move it every time he rearranged his ‘playroom’ (as I lovingly called it…..meh, there is a fine line between lovingly and mockingly, but for the purpose of this post, let’s say lovingly) and when it was retired and we had to carry it 20m out of the house and into the garage I had to stop for a rest about 6 times (*pick it up an inch of the floor, shuffle shuffle shuffle, stop, rest repeat*), the thing was heavy! There was no way M could set that up by himself. Here’s my first hint: don’t make a board like that! Now we spend so much time getting boards in and out of the trailer we need something that is easy to move around. We trialled getting thin MDF board. It just needs to be thick enough that when it is on a trestle table the wood doesn’t bow with the overhang. Ours are 6mm thick (much thinner than the inch thick board he had before). For practical reasons storing a full size board is a nightmare, where do you keep a piece of 4’x6′ board that isn’t going to be an eyesore? It is also difficult to move around by your self. We trialled having them cut in half and having 2 boards 4’x3′. That was still a little cumbersome so we have settled on cutting into thirds, three boards 2’x4′ and they are easy to move around and easy to set up a table by yourself, they also easily sit in the back of a wardrobe out of the way or on a shelf in the garage 😀.
Theme
So next up is theme. Pick a theme for your board. Our themes have been chosen for us in a way as we are lucky enough to have a stash of FATmats and the European version from Gamemat.eu. – the majority of which we have purchased but a few we were lucky enough to have donated to our support our 2015 and 2016 Masters events from Frontline games. (Just as a sneak reveal here, I’m pretty darn excited that Ob Sec are releasing our own vinyl board covers for table top gaming in the very near future. We will have 5 scenes to choose from, lava, Mars, desert, grass and ice, they are permanent vinyl table covers and are designed as a lower cost, durable option. I’m a very nervous because these were my brain child, M was pretty involved with the choice of designs but otherwise it is down to me so fingers crossed they are as awesome in real life as they are in my mind!. Even though I’m so excited about this M made me promise not to say anything about them until they arrived….hmm he should have written the blog post then shouldn’t he hahaha). Where was I, oh yes, theme. So the first thing you need is a theme, if you are lucky enough to own a FATmat or table cover of some sort then you are sorted with theme, if you don’t have a mat or cover then you have a blank canvas so take some time to decide what you want to play on.
The theme then guides your terrain and ties it all together, for example our arctic table is all blue ice with snow dusting on everything. In the same way hat you paint your armies so they are uniform, you want your terrain to be cohesive. If you have 2 FATmats (and I know some of you have 2 if not more because I’ve been the one checking them off as they arrive and are collected!) and you only want one set of terrain, is there a way that you can make the terrain to suit both tables?
(OOP Forgeworld Terrain for our Alien/Tyranid table)
When M and I have been building the tables we look at the theme and chat about what we would see in that scene, I.e. on the grass table we have trees and rocky outcrops, craters etc, on the ship table we have water pipes, a teleport pad, generators etc. While we want terrain on the table we want it to be appropriate terrain, so that means no mountains on the ship interior!
Another thing we look at is the amount of terrain. I’m going to be honest terrain can be expensive so it can be tempting to go with less terrain, we always work to have a minimum of a quarter of the table covered, we aim for at least a third of the table covered but for urban tables when we are simulating built up areas we have more than half of the table covered. When I was talking to someone about terrain I said that I would expect events to have about a third of the table to be covered and they said ‘You’re dreaming, where are you going to find a third of the table covered?’ We haven’t just picked a third out of the air, that amount of terrain is needed and I’ll cover why in a little while.
Cost
The terrain itself can be as expensive or as cheap as you want it to be. I have seen some amazing terrain built out of old kids toys and Pringles cans. The only thing we would suggest to aim for is if you are building something out of a Pringles can, try and ensure that the finished product doesn’t t look like a Pringles can when it goes on the table! There are some pretty cool templates available on the internet that you can download and print for free and build in heavy duty card or plasticard. We haven’t done that but some of the pics I’ve seen on Pinterest are pretty cool. We have a lot of GW terrain, we just purchased and had some terrain donated by Tactics made by CNC which is laser cut wood and comes with the coolest instructions I’ve ever read (‘this is a bit fiddly, sorry guys’ ‘you’ll need to wiggle it to get it in’). We make sure we have some ‘genuine’ terrain pieces for each table and DR has been awesome in his foam sculpture skills and more recently cork tile sculpture skills. If you look at our ice table, alien table and barren table they all have very similar terrain pieces made from hacked foam, they have just been painted differently to match the theme of the different tables.
Cover(age)
As I said earlier when we put together our tables we not only try to ensure that a third of the table is covered but we need to make sure that the terrain actually provides cover for the models. As a general rule a model needs to have 25% cover to be able to roll for a cover save. If we only have trees on our grass table it looks cool and provides a nice looking table but doesn’t offer any cover. By adding the rocky outcrop, tanks and larger vehicles can hide like the sneaky little cowards they are, just kidding, wanted to see if you were still paying attention. I was kidding about sneaky cowards (in all seriousness running and hiding from an attack is a perfectly legitimate tactic in this game, it’s just calling it taking cover sounds better, oh M really is going to wish he wrote this post 😀). As well as needing to provide cover, we also need to ensure when the terrain is set out it is set in such a way as to block line of sight and the terrain needs to be an appropriate size to do that, while also making sure that the models can actually freely move around the table! Far out there is a lot to think about.
We also try to provide a perception of height and perception of scale on the table. The GW scale is that for a building each floor is 3 inches so when we built the water pipes for the ship table we aimed to have the tallest 6″ high. This also allows us to make sure we are keeping some sort of scale. If the average 1 story building is 3″ and we put a tree on the table that is 9″ tall that is one massive tree.
Painting
As far as painting terrain goes (I’m half way through writing up a post on the last lot of terrain I built for the urban table and will post that after Masters), spray cans are your friend! Someone told us Fiddly Bits paint from Bunnings is brilliant. Someone lied! We tried it. It’s not brilliant, although it gave my space ship water pipes a lovely rough, textured finish which has worked out well, it is not an effect that you would want on most of your terrain pieces. We did try the water based spray from Bunnings – Dy Mark, and that was pretty ok but generally we use the GW paint. Seriously if you are going to spend a small fortune on terrain and models don’t scrimp on the paint 😀. A can of GW spray paint is $29aus and goes a heck of a long way (and this is coming from someone who is a massive tight wad!) Spray painting the bigger parts of terrain saves hours of hand painting. DR managed to paint the 6 shipping containers on the ship interior table in about 10 minutes including 2 colour spray, corrosion, and details. Hand painting those 6 would have taken hours! Dry brushing is also your friend, as are weathering powders, washes, oxides and all the fancy new effects that M was doing manually a decade ago. If you haven’t checked them out, really do. They are seriously cool and make such a big difference to make the pieces look ‘finished’ and they take next to no effort!
(Emma hard at work building terrain!)
I have only been involved in table development for the last fortnight although what a learning curve that last fortnight was (and seriously I am editing this post now so I don’t have to paint anything! I’m a bit sick of terrain!) I literally went from only being allowed to snip the models of the sprue and not knowing how to dry brush last Friday, ‘no, that would be wet brush painting’ was an actual sentence M said to me, to designing tables, building models and painting them from start to finish in a week. If you were thinking that building a table is way too hard for you then you’re wrong, you are starting with some knowledge of painting techniques and model building. I was starting with ‘well I’ve seen terrain before’. If I can do it, you surely can. We have a MASSIVE event planned for next September (shhh I’m not supposed to mention that either as we are officially announcing that at the awards ceremony at Masters on Sunday) and my intention is to develop one table a month minimum between now and then. I’ll keep you up to date with the progress.
(Danger Rod making a wrecked Plasma Obliterator!)
I know we have some amazing table builders in our community and I would love to hear from you with any tips or tricks you might have so not only I can learn but so I can share those with the less experienced people too. Similarly, if you are new to this like I am, I’d love to hear how you are going, if you have any questions etc and hopefully those more skilled in our group will chime is with support and suggestions! Jump on Facebook to ask any questions or leave advice 😀 (*note* I don’t believe in constructive criticism, criticism by its very nature is negative and we are about building a positive community so anyone who asks a question will be met with positive feedback or constructive positive feedback depending on if they are asking for advice. If you want to just show off what you have done then positive feedback is welcome, if you want advice then constructive positive feedback is great! I can’t wait!)
So in a nut shell that is my take on table design and building a table. I am not sure if that is likely to be useful but if nothing else it gives me another blog post so I think that means I am equal in number to those written by DR, now to overtake him!
Happy building!
E