Hobby Update - The shifting maze

 Over Christmas I got inspired and built a shifting maze game board.

This is a recent game of Solo Stargrave. At the start of each turn the player picks up the spare tile and puts it at one end of the 2nd, 4th or 6th row or column and then slides that whole row or column down so that the just placed tile is part of the maze and the tile at the other end pops out and becomes the spare. The only restriction is you can't put the tile back where it came from.
As the tiles slide past each other, new entrances are created and others closed off. Players can use the changing of the maze to advance their own characters, hinder the opposing team or unleash monsters.
In this game it was very difficult to keep the whole team in the same tile and as a result the team got separated and in some cases eaten alone and in the dark.
For the monsters I rolled randomly where the spare tile would go.
In the end 3 members of the team made it across the board with a couple of treasures.

I made the tiles with a base of 100mm square acrylic tiles. This helped me make the tiles as square as possible while giving me a nice smooth base to help with the tiles sliding across the table. The walls and floor are lines with craft foam. This was textured with my Greenstuff world rollers. The flagstone roller worked the best but the other rollers all left enough of an impression in the foam that can be brought out with paint job.





I used a mix of craft paints washes and weathering powders to get the colour into the foam tiles. You can see the different textures in this picture. Some of the corner joints had some gaps so I made webs out of stretched baby wipes (like you would make for a marble effect) and then glued these over the corners that were not quite up to code. Once all the webs were dry I went back over them with watered down PVA and used this to spread the webs over the wall and maximise the stick.

So now with extra creepy.

This terrain set works for many different games. It could be a game of AvP or it could be the inside of an Alien spaceship or it could be the inside of a tomb complete with undead guardians.


Comments

  1. An intriguing game for player versus player- terrain almost as an enemy in itself. Can you pop out a tile if there are models in it?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes you can push a room full of models out of the maze. However if you push a room full of enemies or monsters out of the maze, the next player will put them back into the maze anywhere they want. You could move some of your models out the way of the enemies but then your opponent gets to put them where they want. That might not go well.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Stargrave 40k - "we just got our asses kicked man"

7TV Vlads Army - the climax - Battle at the Church

Battlefleet Gothic - game three - mining claim dispute