How to create Re-usable terrain for war games

An Easy Base

For this nifty Flames of War® terrain, we used a 4 foot by 4 foot piece of green felt as the base. You can get this in any fabric store. Felt makes a good starting base for easy, quick terrain. You can use blue for sea games, brown for the desert, or green as we did here. You could also use cut pieces of this felt for rivers, lakes, forests or grain fields as we did. We use green or brown felt on a blue field to represent islands for your sea battles.

Trees

We built Bocage for our Normany scenario using corner moulding from a “home building” store. We cut the moulding to different lengths and then drilled holes and attached pre-made trees. Then we took Woodland Scenics® shrubbery and used white glue to attach different colors of it along the moulding, letting it dry overnight. We now had lengths of re-usable hedges from four inches to 28 inches in length.

Roadways and fields

We took lengths of 1/8 inch thick basswood, painted them with white glue and poured Woodland Scenics® ballast on the wood and let it dry overnight. We took light green felt and glued rows of lighter green bushes to represent the rows of grain.

Place and play

A little bit of preparation will allow you to create lots of different terrain for your game. Lay down the base, add the hedges, roads and fields, and you have nice looking terrain and you’re ready to play. Add a few buildings in the proper scale and you have a great looking playing field.