How much will this weigh?

A concern has been raised about the weight of this board. To be honest I hadn't considered it. I'd thought about area, storage and breakdown etc but for some reason weight never came to mind. So I've worked it out.

The lightest tiles are 450g, the heaviest almost a kilo. The average tile is going to be around 850g. That's for a tile with a straight or corner with pillars and a few extra terrain bits thrown on for good measure. Assuming the lightest and heaviest cancelthemselves out somewhat, the end result is the board weighing around 30kg. Heavy but not unreasonable.

So, as said the original plan was a room/corridor per tile. It would have looked somewhat like this:

I've just thrown in some random pieces as scatter terrain and nothing is actually glued. The figures are 28mm from Westwind. The astute amongst you will recognise the obvious problem with this setup. Friction. If I have several tiles built like this then when I try and pick one up to move or rotate it, the surrounding tiles will be pulled up too due to the amount of shared surface area. While the walls are pretty strong, they're only half an inch thick and I could see an awful lot of damage being caused in games.

So, after a brief re-think. I switched doors for walls like so:

As you can see, no single tile will form a room but will act in conjunction with the others to make a fluid board. This actually gives more useable play area overall and allows larger rooms. It also minimises friction, strengthens the walls and gives a convenient place to hold when lifting the tile. I also realised later that with a bit more preperation, it'll make the whole thing far easier to cast and build!

I then sat down with my technical pad to think about the tiles and what to make. The result I came up with is:

The above sections will give me all the basic options with extra straights and corners, some doglegs and two u-turns. While the doglegs and u-turns can be achieved on other tiles, having tiles specific to it gives more restriction on those tiles and allows for some interesting terrain scenes. Particularly the u-turns with their row of alcoves, just asking for statues or sconces. Currently I have six blank tiles which will allow me to place large "scatter" terrain pieces such as fountains or perhaps stairs as entry points. A blank tile cant rotate, simply because it would be difficult to lift out and there is little point as figures can leave from any side anyway. I may cut it down to four blank tiles as it strikes me that six will give too much open space. There's no way to actually tell until it's all done though.

Most of the floor tiles will be built like this, although with walls added:

A mix of cracked and full tiles to give some variation for the eye.

Some will be built like this however:

Hopefully it can be seen in these pics, it's clear on the original but Blogger shrinks them a bit. There is a pattern running around the edges and some picture tiles in the middle. This will mostly be used on the blank tiles I think but may well be incorporated into some of the others for variety.

As I said earlier, with a bit of preperation this whole build can become very quick and simple. I have now cast the standard block mold many, many times and have achieved this:

Slightly jumbled as they aren't glued yet, and it can clearly be seen that one of the straights isn't complete in that picture. It now is, the grey/brown casts shown in the last post have now set and some pieces have been used to finish that wall. Those four pieces will be glued, cleaned up and then moulded. I can then cast the walls as single pieces, which will speed everything up and make them stronger. From one cast I could make up to three tiles, assuming I can get another big floor mold and perhaps a pillar mold made too :)

That will have to be enough pics for now. Next proper update will be with a mold or a finished tile build I suspect.

This post has pictures and everything!



Okay, so the project continues. The initial idea was that each tile would be a room or corridor and could be shifted around. Each entry point to a tile would be on the central two inches per side with walls around the rest. Obviously not all the entry points would be open, otherwise there'd be no point to the labyrinth!



So, I bought 8" square MDF bases from http://www.eastridingminiatures.co.uk/index.htm and a selection of Egyptian Molds from http://www.hirstarts.com/molds/moldsegypt.html (or I would have done if I didn't own them already).



Here's a shot of my casting area with casting in progress. The black molds are rock molds for another project, the turquoise ones are the Hirst Arts molds and the white ones are some custom molds I made to speed up casting.

The colour variation is due to me adding some clothes dye to the plaster to see if I could colour the casts. It works but increases setting time significantly. As a note of warning, I've also tried adding in acrylic and poster paint, these don't work! Not only is setting time drastically increased but the plaster doesn't mix properly making air bubbles virtually guaranteed and it also weakens the casts themselves. With my normal casts I can't break a standard block without tools, the casts with paint added, I could crush with some effort.

Another update shortly, I'm being sent to forage for food right now.

And so it starts.....

So, a Blog! I know, they're so cliche'd these days. Anyone reading this will be happy to know I have no interest in pouring my heart out or treating this as a diary. This is happening so that I have a central place to list my wargaming projects and hopefully keep me on track with them.

So, the first project up is an Egyptian labyrinth board. This will be made up of 36 8x8" tiles which will cover a 4'x4' area. The idea being that after each players turn they can rotate some tiles thereby altering the board layout quickly and easily.

The tiles will be made from plaster castings made with Hirstarts' Egyptian molds on very thin MDF squares. The plaster used is a stonecast powder. Fairly easy to get, pretty cheap and much stronger than plaster of paris. The next post will show my initial ideas, why they don't work and the first tile being built.