Building a Better Bridge Table Part 1

 After Pete raised the bar with all of his new terrain (you can see it in the latest battle report Might Makes Right), I decided I needed to invest some time to improve the game experience at my place.

For years, we have played games on flat rectangles with a few hills or buildings to break it up, although we have also played a few battles on a circular battlefield for variety. For a long time, I have been wanting to make a table that utilizes the vertical element to a greater degree with more depth. Also, two years ago I built a huge bridge terrain piece and we even played a visually awesome battle with it, but I feel the current table setup to use the bridge is too limiting. 

So I have decided to try to build a table with the following charactersics:

1. Non-rectangular shape
2. Significant elevation changes (not flat)
3. Accommodates the bridge terrain piece 

I sketched out some ideas for hexagon and octagon tables using trusty PowerPoint. Since my dining room table is round, these shapes seemed like a more natural fit to take advantage of the table support than a rectangle anyway (which was always hanging in one direction and leaving extra table in the other direction).

After looking at a few designs, this is the one that I landed on. The grey rectangles represent the road and bridge pieces. The blue rectangle represents the canyon/river/whatever that the bridge will cross. The black circle is the outside of my dining room table. 

The area is quite large at over 36 square feet, bigger than a 9 ft x 4 ft rectangle. I wanted a lot of area to accommodate bigger games and because the bridge piece is so large that it would overwhelm a standard 6 ft x 4 ft table. 

With the rough outline in place, I had to think about how to build it. Since it is so large, I decided to build it in two halves to make it easier to handle and store when it is not setup. With big 8 ft x 4 ft x 1 inch pieces of insulation foam, I could make two half-octagons that were 80" x 40" each, with some scraps leftover to make the hills. I bought some foam and started cutting these shapes out to be the base of the board. 

Now I just need to decide if I want to split the battlefield along the river (vertical cut in my image above) as I originally planned, or if I should split it along the road (horizontal cut in my image above). The advantage of having the two piece come together under the road is that I could leave the road off and then place it down for games to cover the seam between the two boards. 

I have some ideas for how to add elevation and to make sure there are still options for setting up additional terrain on the board. For the "river" the bridge is crossing, I am thinking to make it more of a ravine. A few reasons: I do not know how to get water effects with resin, this table will represent the eastern desert wastes of Xhorik Prime so it does not make sense to have a wide river, I want to ensure infantry can cross the gap in multiple places and not just at the bridge, and I can still come up with some ideas for the bottom that may be easier to model, such as nearly-dried up puddles of water or waste, etc. 

Plenty more planning and building to do! Updates to come.