When you’ve been in this hobby as long as I have, you start to accumulate a lot of weird junk. Boxes of weird bits, curious packaging, interesting beverage lids, partitioned trays, textured plastic sheeting, that sort of thing. I’ve been dutifully collecting this flotsam for more than two decades, hauling it from house to house over the years, always adding, never subtracting, all with some vague idea that one day I would mash it all together with unhealthy amounts of glue and create some sort of grimdark Inq28-inspired sci-fi battle board.

Well, gentle reader, that day is today.

In recent years, I’ve scratchbuilt a table’s worth of rusted industrial terrain — platforms and barricades and control panels and pipelines — perfect for Inq28 and all manner of small-scale sci-fi skirmish games. The stuff looks nice on the tabletop, but what I’ve been missing was some sort of substrate to tie it all together … a game mat or prepared surface that finishes the aesthetic.

I always wanted to build a proper battle board, ever since I peeped a battle report from years ago, featuring some of John Blanche’s Inq28 warbands fighting it out in an oil-spattered Adeptus Mechanicus marketplace on some long-forgottten tech moon. The link escapes me, but maybe one of my faithful readers will dredge it up.

Anyway, my dream of building a proper battle board kicked into high gear when I was scrounging around a hardware store and found a beautiful slab of 1-inch MDF, cut to 32 inches square, calling my name like a siren at sea. At $1.75 out the door, I couldn’t beat the price.

It’s slightly smaller than I’d preferred (36 inches square would have been ideal) but beggars can’t be choosers.

I sealed both sides with Mod Podge and set to work covering it with all manner of accumulated debris … cross stitch grating, aquarium filter panels, straws for conduit and piping, empty medical device cassettes, plus tons of off-cuts and leftovers from various MDF terrain projects. Truly, it was a deep dive to the very depths of my DIY terrain bins.

Once I glued the large pieces down, I turned my attention to the texturing. I planned to add some fairly intense rust effects, so I liberally applied texture paste, sand, and grout mix in a haphazard manner, aiming for a patchy finish.

After that, the whole thing got several successive sprays of black primer, followed by metal spraypaint to give the whole thing a suitably sci-fi starting point.

A heavy black/brown wash followed the silver spray. It was a big bottle I’d mixed myself 10+ years ago, starting with Future Floor Wax and adding in brown and black paint plus water to create a rich, easy to apply wash for terrain projects. (It dries super fast, too, which meant this project could be accomplished in an afternoon.)

From there, I ripped up some chunks of old mattress foam and went to town with sponged-on rust colors: browns, ochres, oranges, as well as some weird turquoise to provide a little pop.

Trust me when I say that the sponged colors don’t look nearly so blotchy in real life. The silver base color really ties everything together.

I affixed some hazard striping details in a few spots that are likely to draw the eye. (Sidenote: we no longer sully ourselves trying to paint hazard striping here at Comrade’s Wargames, not since we ran across a beautiful textured high-resolution printable JPG that will meet our needs for years to come). Grab it for yourself at the link below.

The sponging was quick and frighteningly fun — I always do my best terrain work with old brushes or chunks of sponge, the bigger the better. I’ll probably go through and pick out a few details for further brushwork at some point in the future (such as the chain lengths draped over various pipes and grates). But I’m quite pleased with how this turned out! I even took a moment to arrange some of my existing terrain collection on my new battle board, just to see how it all looks together.

Chef’s kiss, I’d say!

Now, I wish I could say that this terrain project used up all the trash and random junk I’ve accumulated over the years. But I would be lying if I said that. While I’m pleased to get some use out of this stuff, my total collection of detritus barely shrunk. Oh well! I’ll be well equipped the next time inspiration strikes.

We’ll put this battle board through its paces in a couple of weeks with Shadow War: Armageddon. Stay tuned!