Does any company have an alternative for boarding action walls and/or floor tiles from GW?

[Deus_Ex_Machina]

As the title says.

[ThePenitentOne]

What I would do if I wanted to play cheap is build my own- you can cut out pieces of thick corrugated cardboard that are the same size as the walls and have "hatches" in the same locations. You'll need to glue layers of corrugated cardboard together to get them to stand up on their own- if the cardboard is double thickness like the stuff refrigerator boxes are made of, three layers will be enough, but if it's the more common thinner cardboard, you might need more.

You can add detaillng made from thinner, uncorrugated cereal box cardboard and pipes made from drinking straws of various thickness (McDonald's straws are fat, Taco Bell are skinnier and elbow straws are the bomb if you can find them).

For hatches, what I do is cut hatch-shaped holes in the outer layers, and then leave a blank rectangular cut out wider than the hatch-hole in one of the inner layers. Then you can slide a cardboard rectangle into that cut-away to close the door, and pull it back out to open it again. As a bonus, this means you don't have to ever worry about moving models to accommodate the swing of an opening hatch, because the doors just pull straight up.

It sounds cheap, and it is. Most of the stuff you need to build it, you can accumulate for free over three months or so... Faster if you go looking for empty boxes from retailers- many places will give away their boxes if you ask. You can also buy boxes for moving and stuff- the advantage there is that it's all exactly the same thickness and you can get it all at once... But the disadvantage is that it isn't free.

There's another design for 3d boards that involves putting thick, identical squares on the floor of the board with gaps between them that you can shove a layer of cardboard into- the squares on the floor will hold the wall upright even if it's too thin to stand on its own. In this method, you put a lot of time into the floor, but once it's done, you can cut more walls than you'll ever need in a single day, because they only have to be one layer thick, unless they include sliding hatches as described above. When I built my first 3d Space Hulk board in the late 90's this is the method I used. On door walls, for the outer layers, I used cereal box cardboard because I didn't need extra thickness to help the wall stand. This allows the door walls to be almost the same thickness as the single layer walls without doors. Just remember that you don't want to add any cereal box detailing to the part of the wall that has to fit into the floor groove.

If you're using official printed missions, you need to cut your walls to match the commercial stuff, and/ or make sure that your floor grooves are placed in such a way that they allow to build all of the board layouts you want to create. But honestly? If you build your own board pieces, it's really easy to write your own missions. You have the freedom to make whatever size and shape of boards you want.

That Space Hulk Board I built in the 90's? It was awesome- I divided it into 2'x2' sections. Each section had 10x10 2.25" sections with roughly 1-2mm gaps between them. I built 8 such tiles, and for most games we used 6 of them, which allowed us to build a 4'x6' board. But what's cool is that we didn't HAVE to lay them out that way- one time we used 4 tiles to build a 4'x4' square, and then we placed the other floor tiles in a long corridor leading to it. We also built L-shaped boards and all kinds of cool weird layouts. I wish I still had the board because I could post a Youtube video, but I left it at the Youth Center I was working at because the members of the gaming club at the center helped build it. Sadly, we didn't document the process of it's creation or any of the games played on it, because back in the 90's, internet and scial media were nowhere near as ubiquitous as they are now.

[No Foes Remain]

Battle Systems does some sets, both space station and city ones for either kill team or Necromunda. I still need to build my set that I got from their kickstarter many years ago....

[Brother Tyler]

Cardboard provides the cheapest option for DIY. Two other options you can consider are wood (especially balsa) and plasticard. You can often find relatively cheap wood options at hobby stores. Plasticard is the most expensive option, but there are a variety of thickness and texture options available if you want to liven things up a bit. Plasticard is also the best option in terms of painting and quality (offset by the cost and work involved, of course). Some retailers of plasticard include Litko and Evergreen Scale Models.

 

More expensive options are available from some retailers. Death Ray Designs, for example, has the Deadbolt's Derelict and Navis Mortim terrain sets. These are both MDF terrain sets. I don't think that either comes with floor tiles, however.

[No Foes Remain]

Speaking of MDF, I'm pretty sure TT Combat does some zone mortalis ones as well now that I think about it.

[MARK0SIAN]

2 hours ago, No Foes Remain said:

Speaking of MDF, I'm pretty sure TT Combat does some zone mortalis ones as well now that I think about it.

It does indeed and I can heartily recommend it. The value for money compared to GW stuff is insane!

 

This is my set:

 

 

 

Edited 17 hours ago by MARK0SIAN