Building a Multi-scale Geomorphic Skirmish Board

 There is something about Geomorphic playing surfaces that I find very appealing.  I've done modular caverns and swamps in the past that turned out great.  This time I wanted something that I could use for both 3mm and 15mm Sci-fi.  My inspiration came in part from the geomorphic urban terrain that Space Jacker made years ago and displayed on his Tiny Solitary Soldiers blog (which was just recently removed from Blogger - 😕).  Here is my take on it so far:

I have five tiles completed, and a sixth under way.  Instead of sidewalks made of single large squares, I used smaller ones to make it more scale neutral.  I also went with grass instead of concrete for most of the board. Instead of a blasted out concrete ruin, hopefully this futuristic city will look like a place worth fighting for. 

The basis for the tiles are heavy duty commercial vinyl tiles from the local box store.  They are very rigid, measure exactly 12x12 inches and cost less than $1 USD each.  I started by drawing the pattern on the tiles, the road ways are the exact size of a very narrow two lane road in 15mm and in 3mm would be the sort of wide multilane road typical of a large city. 

The Project Supervisor Reviewing the Plan

The spaces outside the roads and walkways can be divided into nice 4x4 squares, making it easy to base and configure terrain to place on them. The sidewalks were made from cutting up empty egg cartons and the grass is old coffee grounds glued into place with PVA and painted with craft paints.  All together the six tiles will cost less than $15 in materials. 

I currently have the first five done, including two curves, two T's and one straight piece, giving me a wide variety of layouts.  The sixth tile will be just be grass, no roads.  My plan is to work on some hills and forests that fit those nice square surfaces to make the seams less noticable. Hopefully by next week I can post some photos with a few completed buildings and other features!