We start with the pink Styrofoam wallboard insulation which can be found at a home building supply store like Home Depot.

We use the 2 foot by 8 foot lengths. These boards can be found in different thicknesses, we use the 1”, 1 ½ in and the 2” boards. Since the tables we build are 4’ by 6’, we cut 2 feet off the end, and then use the silver duct tape to tape the boards into a 4’ by 6’ tabletop.

The cut off 2 foot lengths get used later for ledges, hills etc.

The easiest way to make long straight cuts in Styrofoam is with a utility knife. Make sure the utility knife has a new sharp blade. Mark the line to be cut using a sharp pencil and a metal straight-edge, then draw the knife across the line dipping the point about half-way through the foam. Place the foam, with the cut edge hanging off of a tabletop, and strike the foam once sharply with the palm of your hand, and the two pieces of Styrofoam will part cleanly.

The best way to cut and shape any kind of Styrofoam is to use an electrically charged wire. X-acto® brand knives and other skill knives are quickly dulled by the beading action of the foam. You can get the wires with either an electrical cord, or a battery. We have found that the battery operated wires, do not get hot enough to cut the foam quickly, and generate frustration and impatience in the user, which often gets the user burned. Even though the electric versions are about $40.00 versus $15 or $20 for the battery operated ones, we find that avoiding frustration and occasional pain makes the extra money worth spending.

Before you do anything else, draw the design of the entire board on a piece of paper. It doesn't need to be a work of art, a rough map is all you need here. Remember it is much easier to remove more foam later, than it is to glue pieces of foam back together.

Decide what game you want the board for. Different games require different amounts of terrain. Skirmish games need more terrain than battallion level, for example. And, as a general rule, Science Fiction games favor more terrain than fantasy.

If you plan on using the board for both Fantasy and Science Fiction style games, you will need to design the board for Fantasy, and then add removable terrain for the SF game. In either case, if you are going to store the board flat, you will want to limit the height and fragileness of the pieces you add to the surface.

In this case, we are designing a board particularly for Warhammer 40K©, so we are going to include lots of terrain features. After drawing our plan on paper, we decide that we want the bottoms of the large “foxholes” to be flat (to make it easier to stand up the figures).

The easiest way to do this is to use a 1 ½ inch thick board for the base, and carve our “foxholes” in a large piece of 1 inch foam board and then glue it in place on the bottom board. Using our Hot Wire© we can carve the holes entirely through the foam. You can use the “holes” as hills, or you can carve hill pieces from your reserve Styrofoam pieces.

We use Games Workshop © PVA to glue the two pieces of Styrofoam together. You can use Elmer’s © or any other good quality glue. Leave the glued pieces untouched overnight to dry.

This is the time to glue on the hills you carved at the same time you were cutting the holes for the foxholes. We also carved some of the extra foam into double layers of sandbags.

When the glue is dry, the pieces will be fairly permanently attached to the main board. This is the time to carve and add lips to the foxholes to represent the piled up dirt that was excavated when they were either dug, or blown by the large guns of the opposing armies.

If you are going to put in a “water feature,” this is the time to carve it. In this case you don’t want the bottom perfectly flat, because you are going to cover it with terrain and artificial water anyway. Glue all the extra pieces onto the main board with PVA and let dry overnight.

At this point we added a small piece of brass tubing to the side of the water area, to look like a drainage flow. We switched to a freehand router on our Hot Wire and added fissure lines to the Styrofoam to add “realism” to the final look of the board. We used Hot Wire Foam Coat © to give some added texture, and to fill the gaps between the foxholes and the lip. This gives us areas of cover so that the board is self-contained, and we don’t have to add too many extra pieces of terrain for the Monday night battle.

This is a good time to make sure the miniatures that you intend to use on the board will all fit nicely and be able to stand up. Grab a few miniatures and check all the cramped or heavily carved up spots.

We use Latex house paint to seal the Styrofoam and protect it from the spray paint we are going to use later. The paint also seals the Styrofoam so we can add artificial water and not have it bleed into the foam base.

Use either black, dark brown, dark grey or dark green colored paint, depending on the general theme of your board. We used a dark brown, since this is going to be a war-torn battlefield. Don’t forget to carefully cover the “sandbags” and other pieces of added terrain. Again, let the paint dry overnight.

The best place to get sand is a local pool shop. You can either get sandbox sand, or pool filter sand, which is actually small even clean gravel. It costs about $8.00 for 50 pounds. Chose your sand based on how rough you want the surface to be and how dense you want it to be. It is a good idea before your first board, to practice on a piece of spare foam.

Pour the Scenic Cement (or dilute your PVA to a sprayable consistency) into a plastic spray bottle. Soak a small area with the Scenic Cement and then using your hand as a funnel, spread the sand thinly over the wet area.  Continue until you have covered the entire area you want to be sanded. Spray the entire sanded area with another coat of Scenic Cement, and let the entire board dry overnight.

Use either Games Workshopfont size="-4">© or Testorsfont size="-4">© spray paints to add areas of color to the board. The propellant in the spray cans will not affect the protected Styrofoam. Then, using a plastic coated paper plate as a mixing platform, add some different browns, and using a 1” or ½ inch brush dry brush some color onto the sanded board. Add some other colors until the surface looks right to you.

We use Woodland Scenics© for landscaping terrain. Ballast comes in different sizes and colors for roadways and paths. We added Clump Foliage for some color and then added Gale Force Nine’s © Concrete Rubble in different areas. We used wood dowels and wire to have a fence in one area. Added a little green flock for some more color. All flock and ballast was double coated with spray scenic cement, the clump foliage is held in place by PVA, and the concrete rubble is held with super glue. Again let it sit overnight to dry.

There are at least three different kinds of materials you can use for “artificial water.” Woodland Scenics© makes a single part Artificial Water. The second way is to put down several layers of PVA, letting each layer dry thoroughly. If you have the time and patience and don’t make the “water” too thick, this will work, since PVA dries clear. The third way is 2-part Epoxy Resin. You can get very good resin at a boat store or less expensive resin at a good paint store. The best epoxies are mixed 1 part hardener to 2 parts resin. Some of the cheaper resins are 1 part hardener to 4 parts resin. Make sure you choose a “slow” hardener, because all epoxies generate heat as they cure. Too much heat too fast will melt the Styrofoam.

After mixing the resin, we added a little black ink to the mix, because we wanted it to look like “oily sewage.” We took some Woodland Scenics© Water Effects© and laid out lines of “water” on wax paper, and let it dry overnight. We then took the dried lines of Water Effects and glued them into the exposed end of the brass tube to look like the liquid pouring out of the tube and into the spillage.

The best test of any board is playing on it, so we tried our new board out on Monday night with spectacular results.