Tabletop Terrains

S AY THE WORD “GAMING” AND MOST people these days will think of the first-person shooting and role playing that takes place on a computer screen. Or maybe a family board game. But to a relatively small and dedicated cadre of players, “gaming” brings to mind a rich and diverse skill set and activities including carpentry, painting, sculpting, mold-making and casting, scale modeling, and environmental simulation. This is the realm of the tabletop miniature wargamer.

There are tabletop wargames based in many genres, but the most common are historical, fantasy, or science fiction. The process for making terrain boards and pieces is basically the same across the genres, but in this article, I’ll talk about sci-fi terrain — the type with which I’ve had a lot of personal experience.

spend dozens of hours constructing — sometimes to nearly museum display quality — are not just for ambiance and the cool factor. They also provide much-welcomed cover when your ground forces need a place to duck behind, or your sniper team needs high points in which to nest.

Terrain for Beginners

Getting started in miniature wargaming can be an expensive and time-consuming proposition. Like paper-and-pencil role-playing games and map-based wargames, the rules can be very intimidating to newcomers. There are lots of hit, wound, and save tables to memorize, terrain and other dice modifiers to understand, special rules to remember. On top of that, miniatures mean toy soldiers: dozens, even hundreds, of little plastic and metal soldiers to buy, assemble, paint, and base.

What Is Tabletop Miniature Wargaming? Once all of that’s done, the last thing you want to Before we talk about the terrain making, we need to do before playing is to spend months more build-understand what the terrain is for. The mechanics ing a terrain board and scratch-building dozens of of each tabletop wargame are different, but play buildings, barricades, rubble piles, and the like. basically boils down to “fire and movement”: mov- Luckily, you can get away with some pretty ing your toy soldiers ... er ... troops into position groovy-looking terrain made from little more than (how far you can move is determined by dice rolls kitchen trash. The trick is developing a terrain build-and measured with a tape) and firing your weapons er’s eye. Look carefully at what goes into your trash at your opponent’s models (determined by dice can. Any metal can, turned over, can become a stor-rolls and the rules for the weapons depicted on the age tank of some sort. A bunch of them together model). Nearly all tabletop wargames are WYSIWYG can serve as a fuel depot, a worthy objective for a (What You See Is What You Get), so the models game. A cut-up egg carton becomes a field of alien must actually show the weapons and defenses they gestation pods. The plastic dividers in boxes of are using in play (e.g., you can’t have a model holding cookies, crackers, and candy, flipped over, can serve a projectile weapon and claim that it’s a plasma as futuristic army barracks, power stations, com-pistol). Terrain (woods, swamps, mountains) becomes mand bunkers, and anything else your imagination very important because it affects movement rates can dream up. and “line of sight” rules. So, the buildings that gamers Of course, none of this stuff is going to look very

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