Disclaimer: if you decide to
build one of these yourself it will look nowhere near as amazing as the zone
mortalis sets offered by forgeworld. It will however take less time to
build/paint and cost about 10% of the price!
So this is one of my less planned
projects and has in fact only been on the cards for the past week. My good
friend ‘old two eyes’ is currently building a themed board for game 3 of our
6-part campaign (part 2 being fought tomorrow so batrep up next week). This is
a starcraft inspired 3x3 board representing a facility and is built from
foamboard and bits. While I know his skills to be vastly superior to mine in
the terrain department, I was inspired by the idea of building a cheap zone mortalis
to add variety into games of 40k.
My approach was very simple – I
bought 5 sheets of 5mm thick A3 black foamboard. Black because it would then not
have to be painted. This cost me £10 with free shipping off ebay but I have
since found it cheaper elsewhere. I grabbed myself a new 40p hobby knife from a
discount store, ruler, chopping board and pen and got started. It took next to
no time to cut the 5 sheets of foamboard as follows:
4 x square 297x297mm boards (the
tiles)
15 x 297x60mm (approx)
lengths (the walls)
I was then stuck as to how I
could make the tiles interchangeable for different scenarios etc. My eureka
moment came when I looked at forgeworlds website and found they had 4 different
tiles to choose from – I simply decided to copy these. It was easy enough to do
– I simply divided the tiles up into a 6x6 grid (50mm per section) in my mind
and made sure I put the walls bang in the middle of the second square in on the
grid – exactly the same as the zone mortalis just with thinner walls. I then
glued them in place with PVA glue, cutting the joins 45 degrees to line up
nicely. I checked the tiles lined up against each other as I went just to be
safe
So there we have it. This cost me
£10 and took just under two hours to do. I have ordered 15 more sheets of
foamboard and so in the near future should have a 4x4 zone mortalis board to
play on. Not bad for a days worth of time (and lets face it, it would take
longer than that to assemble and paint a FW one) and £40. If anyone needs any
advice on how to build one please get in touch. Cheers.
Found you via B&C and I've got to say, this is great. Obviously if you want to you can go nuts by chopping up some of the Imperial Sector parts and gluing them to the walls, or if you want to keep it cheap make lots of panels and trim out of plasticard, adding a few monitors and terminals along the walls.
ReplyDelete