Throwback Post: Building a Mordhem Board

Here's the first in what will probably be a few different posts recapping some of the highlights of my hobbying throughout the year before I jumped on the blogwagon. In this case, how I decided to build a bespoke gaming board in under a month for Under the Dice Fest this past May.

I started with some 18"x18" square pieces of plywood a carpenter friend of mine cut down to size, though you could easily get this done at the hardware store when you buy it (I had gotten mine secondhand so this didn't apply to me). I firstly glued down 18" squares of pink XPS insulation foam over the wood, figuring I might add some recessed details or other, below-street-level things on these or future tiles. I ran out of full sheets of the foam after 3 complete tiles, but using some smaller pieces I was able to make an L-shaped corner with plans to add another taller section in the remainder or maybe a harbor area.

Since elevation is a big factor in Mordheim and I was doubting my ability to bang out a city block's worth of new buildings in the short weeks before the event, I also cut some riser blocks out of 2" XPS to block line of sight and create visual interest, especially in places where two boards pushed together would form little alcoves or alleyways. I could have kept these risers modular and separate, but went with permanent installations to cut down on the amount of surface area I would have to detail under a time crunch. My goal was for each quarter of the board to be modular, so you could rotate and swap out the different sections for a bunch of replayability and variety. I also wanted some orientations to have room for buildings at ground level, to break up longer avenues and offer cover from archers.

Starting some initial layout ideas for where to put risers/buildings. For reference, the board was at this stage less than 9 days before the event. Goddamnit Ben!

Having played on Steve of Hive Scum's Mordheim board at Adepticon and been impressed with his cork paving stone technique, I stole it wholecloth for my own board. I'm pretty sure he covers it in detail in a few of their podcast eps, but to recap: you score and break apart cork tiles into vaguely rectangular shapes, rake them with a metal wire brush to score in some more surface detail, glue them down, then spackle over the entire thing to fill in the more subtle cork-y texture and "grout" between the individual tiles.

Forbidden milkshake. Apparently a photo of Drydex spackle was cooler to me than getting more WIP shots of the buildings and board. #priorities.

I planned on using cork for the ground level streets and easy-peel Readi-board foamcore for the riser tops, which when de-papered makes for a uniformly flat, easily textured foam to make tiled pavestones without having to mill down strips of XPS foam on my hotwire table. The weekend before NEMO I completely ran out of my supply and ran to my local dollar store to get a few sheets. Somehow, for the first time in my life they were completely sold out of this type of foamcore. Shit.

What ensued was a really hodge podge and frantic couple days of milling pink and blue XPS foam into strips, then hacking them up into squares and rectangles of varying sizes before glueing them down in a way that looked realistic. I often struggle with how to make flagstones look satisfying to my monkey brain, but I found a really good guide on Rob Hawkins' hobby blog that not only showed the process, but wrote it out in a way I could understand and put into practice, saving me a lot of headache down the line. Laying down rectangles to make bricks sounds easy enough, but doing it in a pattern that kept my OCD dormant took a lot of trial and error up until doing it with his tips.

Moving away from the board itself on over to buildings: I had a handful of partially constructed ruined tudor-inspired buildings, mostly built when I got back into the hobby watching Black Magic Craft's Youtube videos. Although the outer shells of buildings were relatively complete, there was a lot of tedious steps yet to go, namely bricking foundations, putting tudor-style planking outside and inside, adding flooring, windows, doors, shingles, etc. There's no one way to do these steps and I tried a lot of approaches to find the ones that looked acceptable for the limited time I had. I relied on many different size coffee stir sticks, various gauges of square balsa wood dowels, cardstock, premixed tile grout for wall textures, and some 3d printed windows from various sources.

One of many abandoned works-in-progress I salvaged for the board. This one actually didn't even have the wood elements when I started, just the foam base. Balsa dowels for the corner connections and coffee stirrers for the wall beams already make it feel halfway done.

This is about how far most of the buildings were when I started working on the board a couple weeks out. A rough shape, maybe some ruined walls, some initial brickwork if I had been particularly inspired before putting something in the pile of opportunity for future-Ben.

A rear-view showing the floorboards and the roof construction, plus a little sniper platform that could be accessible by an elevated walkway or rope ladder. Mordheim relies heavily on elevation, so I made sure some buildings were 3+ stories tall, and this one got a final 5th level attic later on.

Although I used foam bricks for most of my buildings, I used rough-textured paper pulp egg cartons to cut large stone blocks on this building intended to be a church, with a stained glass STL designed by Wyloch's Armory for a 40k project.

More buildings and a bell tower I digitially kitbashed for the church building. Also on the mat are some rubble piles I made out of scraps of XPS, coffee stirrers, dirt, and extra 3d printed barrels and other scatter, based on scraps of MDF. Primer really does hide all sins.

After using spray primer to get the buildings blocked in, I hit all of them with a white zenithal from my airbrush to pick out all that lovely wood, stone, and stucco texture before preshading everything with a sepia ink. Leif from Devs and Dice uses this on his Mordheim terrain which tends to look perfect for a colorful yet dingy feel. From there, it was a matter of picking a few different colors of craft paint for a building and its details, blocking things in, then highlighting up. Although I drybrsuhed most things like the wooden planks and shingles, for the walls I just stippled lighter color towards the center of each "panel" of stucco in between the crossbeams.

Color isn't a bad thing if you make it look splotchy and lived in! I used yellow instead of the off-whites for this one's walls and a red roof to make it seem like it was in the old colors of Osterland.

There wasn't really an "a-ha!" moment when it all came together for me. I did basecoats and drybrushes on the houses and scatter terrain, primed the board in grey and gave it an initial drybrush (I finished washing the board tiles and re-drybrushing them in the hotel the night before the event, BEFORE finishing my warband 😬).

The bottom right tile in this orientation was the one where I had planned on adding a harbor or some other inset feature due to the L-shaped foam "ground level" around a larger recessed area. Then everyone who saw my board absolutely LOVED the wyrdstone comer that tore through it as a defining feature of the set...so I guess I have to build an all new harbor area another day.

Here's a shot I got of my board set up at NEMO, in a configuration I thought would lend to some fun, tactical gameplay. Some other pieces of scatter terrain and ruins I had made in the past also made their way into the final product.

And the "house rules" that accompanied my board. Nothing too major here, I mostly just wanted feedback on my first real gaming board that was put together way too fast with too little thought.

In the end I was incredibly proud of how quickly I took this project from start to finish! There were definitely times I felt like I would let down the organizers with what I would manage to bring to the event, but I have to say I impressed myself on this one. I heard lots of nice things about the board as it arrived and saw it feature in a few of the online recaps of the event (which was insane, as SO many other boards were more worthy of attention in my opinion!) Best of all I think, is all the mileage I have gotten out of these simple, tileable boards in the months since NEMO wrapped up. For example:

Here's my buddy Matt (squared_paints) and I playing some Necropolis28 on a single board tile. An 18" tile works very well for a 16" diorama scale game, just deploy 1" inside a board edge!

Later this year, playing a game of Trench Crusade on the full 36" setup. The plain grey stonework and built-in risers gives a decent approximation of some ruined 1900s settlment-turned-trench warzone.