One of the things that I love most about miniature war gaming is creating exciting game tables to play with my little plastic army men. Last year I dove headfirst into Star Wars Legion from Fantasy Flight Games and fulfilled my childhood dreams of playing a tactical war game set in the universe of Star Wars. The tables I created only amplified the fun I had with that game.
This year I am focusing on the newly released game ;Marvel Crisis Protocol from Atomic Mass Games. It is a Skirmish game with all your favorite Marvel Heroes and Villains taking place in all manner of settings. The first thing I did after opening my box is start creating a table to play on.
Enter my small scale cityscape table.
I will be showing you how to create a very simple and amazing looking table to start playing your games on so strap in and follow me on part 1 of this tutorial.
Lets start with a material list
-36"x 36" inch MDF or hard plywood. I am building a 24"x 24" inch demo table in my example but if you go standard size just scale your materials accordingly.
-4 sheets Foam Core
-Sandpaper ( several Black Sheets)
-Measuring Tape
-Cutting Blade
-Glue ( white glue works fine)
-Patience ( lots of it )
Try and find sheets of Foam Core or foam from your local craft store. These will be used as the uplifted areas like sidewalks so at least 1/4 inch would be good to give it the approx height that a sidewalk would be in the real world.
Start by laying out your MDF or Plywood and arrange your foam core sheets and your black sandpaper to form a desired street layout. In this case I chose a standard intersection style with two small alleys running off the side.
In my case I was very fortunate that the black sandpaper turned out to be the exact size of a street that I was looking for so I did not need to cut the sheets.
The sandpaper turned out to be an amazing material to simulate the looks and feel of asphalt for the city streets!
The middle of the street and the alley on either side however needed some cutting to cover the wood underneath.
Feel free to cut the sheets to fit based on your design.
Once your foam sheets and your sandpaper are glued down to the board you are actually almost done stage one of the table!
A lot of this build will be spent on measuring the different components that you will be gluing down to the table and figuring out how you want to layout your board hence why I listed "Lots of patience" in the materials section above.
Next up is to print off the sidewalk graphics that I have provided. Keeping in mind that mine are formatted to fit the size of my foam sections ( 7.5 inches wide X 11 inches long). I have created the graphics in an 11 x 17 print size so you can cut out the sections without getting a border from the printer. recommend printing them on card stock as they will get some wear and tear I'm sure.
NOTE: My sections are not as detailed as I would like and the graphic I am using is just a quick one that I whipped up. The individual tiles on the sidewalk/cement/brick area are rather large and don't represent what a real sidewalk would look like. I was just going for a color/pattern for my demo table. In future builds I will revise. I would advise just using any graphic you can find or use mine if your dimensions are similar to mine.
Download the graphics HERE
Part 1 of the city table is complete. In part 2 I will show you how to add some detail work to the board ( sidewalks, crosswalks and no parking zones etc. )
Thanks for reading part 1 and if you have any questions about my build so far please leave a comment below.