From NoelW: The End of the End (part one) (260 points)

At the start of the Challenge, I’d expected that two of my big projects would make headway, but for one reason or another, I hadn’t touched either of them with only one week to go. So I decided I’d aim to do what I could on them for the very last posts. This is the penultimate post.

The first project is Napoleon in Egypt, for which I’ve submitted five whole figures in Challenge IX. My main desire was for a desert board to play on, particularly one which could be configured with a beach for fighting both the French and British invasions of the country.

A long time ago I had the bright idea of experimenting with interlocking playmats (intended for children) as a portable, robust and perhaps configurable gaming mat. These mats have several attractions. They’re cheap. They’re light, so quite portable, and interlock in quite a secure way. They’re made of a soft rubber-type material, so can be easily cut with knife or scissors – though it’s a bit difficult to cut precisely, meaning there’s the occasional ragged edge. One side is rough (to reduce the chance of slipping, when used for the proper purpose), with a sort of industrial floor pattern, meaning it could easily be painted up for an urban or futuristic context. The other side is smooth, untextured, pretty ideal for a sandy beach and/or a desert. The only real problem is that these tiles are multicoloured, so have to be painted for whatever purpose you want them for.

Each tile is approx. 20 inches squre, so 12 of the tiles will fit on a games table of 6’ x 8’ – fine for most of my games, though most only need 6’ x 4’. As this is an experiment for me, I decided to cut four of the tiles into irregular halves, meaning I then had eight pieces that could form a beach (with a blue cloth placed beneath them) and also be arranged potentially to make hills or islands, though in both cases they’d be a bit limited.

Then I simply painted them. Rather than go for a uniform colour, I decided to vary it as much as possible, from a very white yellow through bright yellows to a yellow ochre. I chose this approach for several reasons: thinking of a certain kind of “realistic” variety in terrain, whilst hoping that the irregular colour placing would act as a kind of camouflage to disguise both the joins of the tiles and the impact of the different base colours I was painting over.

I've no space large enough to paint this sort of arrangement safely, so it had to be done outdoors, which is one reason why I've had to wait till now - it needed weather that was not windy, wet or snowy. As Spring is arriving, we've had a couple of beautiful calm and sunny days.

As you can see, the approach has worked somewhat, but is not entirely successful, so I’ll have to think about whether to overpaint some or all of it. Possibly adding some texture, too, might help, but I don't think I want to do that, as it would limit the way the tiles can be linked together.

You can see the line of some of the cuts for the "beach" halves in the first picture. Here's the kind of application I'm looking for. 

BTW: that quite pleasing image of the "sea" against the coast in these two pix is entirely fortuitous. It's plastic I'd laid down over the yard to protect the tiles, and just photographed nicely.

And now, I have a gaming board I didn’t have at the start of the Challenge, and I can set it up in different ways so it'll be used for the Sudan, Crusades and Western Desert games, and perhaps even the coast of Walmington-on-Sea, besides the Napoleonic context I was aiming for, so I’m pretty pleased with what I’ve been able to achieve with comparatively little work.

As for points, using Miles’ cubic calculation method: all 12 tiles stack vertically in a tower 7” x 20” x 20”, making a total volume of 2800 cubic inches. Dividing by 216 for the basic six inch cube, gives 12.96 6” cubes, or 259 points.



TamsinP:

A good idea and certainly a good start as you now have a games mat that you can use. I know that other people have added texture and flocking to this type of mat without losing the ability to link them in various ways, you just need to be a bit more careful around the edges so that they will match up.

I'll provisionally score these as you suggest and will let Curt decide if he wishes to overrule me. But I will round it off to 13 terrain cubes for a nice round number.