Tag Archives: Gaming Board

As mentioned in the last blog post, I’m still embarked on the journey to find the right thickness, material and overall technique to realise my 10mm housing development for Mordheim. 😀

To avoid additional work on my designs, if I choose a building technique after creating all the templates, I decided to tackle that hurdle first.

Currently there are four different styles possible for the buildings – all of them with different levels of detail, assembling difficulty and of course: costs.

Variant #1

The basic technique as used in my first models is a simple 2mm mdf panel with engraved details for the timber framing and small separate windows to get some 3D feeling.

Variant #2

Halfing the mdf’s thickness to 1mm and gluing two panels together gives the opportunity to do some recessed details for windows and doors without needing any more tiny separate parts. Of course I need to run the laser cutter twice as often compared to variant #1.

Variant #3

Using cardboard for the timber framing gives the frontage a way more detailed and realistic look, but you need to glue on some rather delicate parts and we’re again at doubling the cutting process.

Variant #4

Finally, combing #2 and #3 gives the maximum level of detail as well as the most work to create and assemble the houses with its three layers.

So quite some different variants I have to choose from, albeit the whole similar but different dilemma. Which variant would you fancy for your own buildings? Fast, cheap & easy like #1 or difficult & detailed like #4? Or should it even be #2 or #3 for a compromise? 🙂

Inspired by a post in one of the many tabletop groups on Facebook and Reductivetendency’s similar project on his blog, one of my projects this year will be a new Mordheim board. Doesn’t sound that fancy yet?

How about adding: “in 10mm heroic scale” and “with Warmaster-sized warbands“? 😀

Exploring the City of the Damned on a small coffee table won’t be a dream anymore and I can store an entire game on the shelf to finish it later without any effort at all.

But to get there I’ll need a whole load of terrain first: Houses, towers, bridges, ladders and lots of rubble and barricades for a densely filled board.

Even though there are some small companies out there making suitable terrain for Warmaster, none of them provides ruined medieval town houses struck by a warpstone meteorite shower, so I’m off to making my own buildings.

For this project I’m going to make mock-ups in SketchUp before turning them into 2D templates for laser-cut terrain to fill a 40x40cm board. I’m still not sure whether to use 2mm mdf like the examples below or switch to 1mm thickness (or even a mix of both), but the first prototypes will certainly help to solve this issue. 🙂

My first two town houses share interchangeable tiles for the ground storey with different upper storeys and I want to keep the buildings at least somewhat modular for more variation later (and less work beforehand):

All the different designs will start as undamaged buildings just to be reduced to ruins or even rubble for a fitting Mordheim look afterwards. This way I can both offer the regular variants to interested Warmaster or historic wargame players for their gaming boards and make it way easier to design the houses in the first place. 🙂

A lot of my inspiration for the timber framing comes from various old German cities like Rothenburg ob der Tauber, which make wonderful examples for a pre-comet Mordheim. I just need to re-create some of them and then smash all of them with a big smouldering rock. 😀

Rothenburg

Rothenburg

Rothenburg

Rothenburg

Which buildings would you like to see on the Microheim board? A gatehouse? Some wizard’s whacky tower mansion? Something completely different? Just leave a comment with any ideas or even a real-life example for me to re-create. 🙂