Wargaming on a Budget: Homemade Terrain

Wargaming can be expensive, but with a bit of effort and creativity, you can keep the cost down by making your own terrain. This video has some practical suggestions and top tips for creating three basic types of terrain common to most wargames tables. Hills, fields and buildings feature in nearly every period and genre and if you can make them yourself rather than buying commercial products, you can keep the cost of your hobby down.

[HethwillWargames]

Always good to pass info like this. Just a note I think it is important is - our tables do not have to look like the photo shoots in the magazines nor the displays at cons. That simple fact saves a lot of money. My own tip - felt paper + oil pastel sticks = roads, rives, ponds.

[billd.iniowa]

Cheapest hills I've found: Cut corrugated cardboard boxes up into roundish pieces, each piece smaller than the one before. Stack them up and you got a hill. Tape them to the table and throw a big green felt sheet over them. Beautiful rolling hills for pennies. If your felt cloth is too boring just sprinkle flock around and spray PVA (white glue, like Elmers)/water mix to seal it. Be sure to add a drop or two of dish washing liquid to make it flow better. Mix should be consistency of milk to run thru the spray bottle. If you have trouble, cut 2" off the pick-up tube. The glue falls to the bottom and gets thick. Game On!

[corvusboreus]

A few terrain materials can be fossicked for free directly from nature:
Beachcombed sea sponges, cut/torn up and coloured for hedges, shrubs and foliage (sniff test recommended before collecting).
Lichen, collected from old farm fenceposts, used as vines, shrubs and general foliage.
Rocks of all types, especially ones with suitable flat faces so they look properly 'bedded in'.
The stem and roots of some uprooted weedy shrubs (eg senna pendula), inverted and based for use as tree armatures.
Nature provides.

[sandtable]

I'm no terrain expert but sand is about £3 a 20kg bag and covers a 6x5 surface to 15/20mm deep. Trenches, roads, hills, rivers, low walls a doddle. Flock it for colour and it vanishes once back in your tub or bucket. You just need a plastic sheet and an edge round the dinner table. More than half your terrain needs met with no more tools than a dustpan and brush...20mins to put up...10mins to take down. Keep it slightly damp to shape and to stop dust.

[rickparkhurst]

Just "discovered" you and have subscribed. Great suggestions! I have found that when you glue your cardboard together for hills, alternate the directions of the corrugation and it makes it incredibly rigid.

[hankscorpio]

I’m new to the game.
I Love the idea as fabric for fields. Especially the codouroy for the plowed fields.

One of the things I’m liking about FoW, and maybe it 15mm in general, is the emphasis on building terrain.

[martinmeltzer]

Hey Big Lee! Excellent topic and I will use some (all) of your suggestions. Here's two more that I have come across, over the years, that have served me well. The green ScotchBrite scrubs... when they are cut into suitably sized strips for your miniatures and mounted on a base make great hedgerows! Wooden matches... cut off the heads.... and you have the basics for fences, bridges, log cabins, corderoyed roads, timber fortifications, etc..

[lesliebeilby-tipping]

Home made terrain is great if you have the skills. You can build from scratch or start with some made components and finishing them into a setting of your choosing.

Skips are one of the best places for the larger items.

[harold-pl]

TREES - I go out to THRIFT SHOPS around Oct.-Dec. and look for Plastic Christmas Wreaths and break off each little branch to make PINE-TREES and hot-glue each pine-tree-branch to a penny then paint the penny green or brown ! I can get a couple hundred branches off a wreath ! I also look for other man-made foilage that makes bushes and palm-type trees (jungle) ! Little pebbles, rocks, sticks out in the yard help make the effect more realistic depending on SCALE of buildings, troops, etc. ?? Wargaming should be fun so have a good time battling !! :-)

[jpokeefe]

Not sure where I got the idea, but I use cut up short rugs as hills and then cover them with a cloth and put down your other terrain over that. You can also use silicon caulk combined in strips on parchment paper. Use a wet finger or putty knife to shape them. Wait for them to cure and paint them up as roads or rivers.

[mr.pavone]

XPS is great stuff, I make most of my large hills from the stuff and there are some spray paints that are safe for such materials.
I've started designing my own mini-hex sized bits of terrain for board wargaming. I use my kids ToyBox 3d printer to create little hills, forests and castles. The finished product is extremely durable and perfect for playing games systems like Bob Cordery's Portable Wargame and Jay Ward's Simplicity In Hexes.

[tamsinp]

I enjoy making my own terrain. One of the big problems is that you often have steps with very long drying gaps before you can move onto the next step, which means if you are doing a lot you might not have room on the table to do anything else while you wait (my current problem!).

[haroldmorgan]

ONE LAST THOUGHT - We wargame every Thursday night in K.C. Mo. (USA) on a PING-PONG sized table A DIFFERENT HISTORICAL TOPIC EVERY WEEK (Rarely leave the same TOPIC setup on the table again) so YOUR GAMING SYSTEM (I'll call it a SYSTEM) has to leave a CLEAN TABLE after every weeks battle ready for the next weeks battle !! Let me be more distinct - as a WEEKLY DIFFERENT TOPIC every week we can NOT do the 3D molded foam terrain boards etc. that I see in YOUTUBE videos and in Miniatures Wargaming Mags pictures - we have to use a SYSTEM that allows to change the table EVERY WEEK to something else ?? This means a DIFFERENT COLOR table-cover cloth (green grass, beige/tan sand, white snow, blue water etc. etc. sometimes even HEXED depending on the rules etc. ? That means we have to have FLAT HILLS too (multi-level but flat ) so the tree bases will sit flat etc. - with TAPE ROADS & RIVERS so we can pull them up at battle end etc. - Theres a lot of thought WHAT WORKS and WHAT DOES NOT WORK !! :-)

[haroldmorgan]

Foam Hills painted GREEN, BLUE cloth streams, rivers, ponds, TREES - We use the PLASTIC CHRISTMAS WREATHS ( the branches - each branch is a PINE-looking tree hot-glued to a penny ) You can find these about a month or two before Christmas in Thrift Stores (OXYFAM) ! TROOPS - buy some old RISK Games with the little plastic soldiers ! HOUSES/BUILDINGS - find some old LIFE Games and cut off the white TAB pices and paint the buildings ! Cardboard/Paper buildings too out of miniatures mags - make copies to make MORE !! Beige Masking tape for ROADS - BLUE Masking tape for rivers & streams ! GO OUT IN THE YARD and find GRAVEL AND SMALL STICKS for logs (Devils Den etc.) ! Green Pot-scrubbers cut for hedges ! Enjoy the fun !! :-)

[vickyking]

I stick strictly to 15 mm that way my terrain fits most situations

[sirrathersplendid]

Have an old pair of dark brown corduroy trousers waiting to be converted into ploughed fields. I’m just not sure how to stop the edges from fraying…

[sumerandaccad]

I've started buying the cardboard ready made buildings which are much cheaper even than the MDF buildings. Tried using the boxes of the washing powder tablets but my skills are supremely lacking. I'll persevere

[martinradcliffe]

Some good tips- like many wargamers I resent spending money on anything that is'nt figures!

[richardbarker]

Hi, just found tour channel, watched this one and ewanted to know where you get your foamboard and XPS??? from. Ive seen other people use it but locally ive had no joy. I live in Suffolk England cheers

[hankscorpio]

When you say filler, what type of material are you using.

Great vid. 👍