Painting a Gameboard

Last year, my girlfriend, Gwen, helped me out with making a cloth playing mat for BFG. It consisted of a piece of cotton fabric with a star pattern pre-printed on it. This mat has served me well, but it is not perfect. The cloth is thin enough that it picks up wrinkles fairly easily. Additionally, it is a bit narrower than the 4x6 gaming tables used at the local Battle Bunker, meaning that there were several inches of space on either side of the playing area. So, I finally decided to paint a hard gaming board, again with Gwen's help.

Out of personal preference, I decide I wasn't going to get too fancy with regards to what I painted on the board. I've seen pictures of some truly beautiful boards with nebulae and planets and such, but not only do I lack the skill to pull that off well, I prefer to to have such features represented by models or markers so that they can be moved around the board at will. The methods I used actually came straight out of the BFG rule book!

Here are the materials I used for my gameboard. The actual board itself consists of three 2'x4' particle board. Using three panels gives me the option to have an expandable playing surface. I can use 4'x4' for smaller battles, or add the third panel for the full 4'x6' board. At the same time, the whole thing is a lot more convenient for carting around in my car. Rather than brush paint the surface, I decided to use inexpensive black spray paint. I also used several colors of craft paint as well as an old toothbrush to add the stars.

Here are the boards after their initial coat of black. It took a couple of coats to get good coverage, but it turned out three cans of paint was more than enough.

This shot was taken after the white was added to the board by flicking paint from an old tooth brush. The larger spots were transformed into larger stars, comets, and galaxies using tooth picks as described in the rule book.

Using yellow and red paint, we added a few more layers of stars (although, at a lower density than the white). Then, I used a medium blue paint to overspray the black and stars to give a clouded appearance to the board.

Here is a closer shot of the finished board. The various colors used for the starts really seem to make for good depth.

This shot shows a couple of the panels set up on a kitchen table, showing how the modular nature of the board. As you can see, an Imperial squadron is under attack from a traitor paper airplane dubbed "Death Bringer" (this was a little joke, courtesy of my housemate, Brian).

By Andy Rucker