Let's Talk Terrain: Ground

You can't really play a game on a battlefield without the, well, field of battle.  The table top for a wargame, can take many different forms, on many different materials.  Since my focus thus far is based on the Afghanistan war, I decided to base my ground on the pictures my brother took while serving.  A light dust colored, rocky landscape with sparse shrubbery or vegetation.  As I had limited space in my apartment and likely will also have limited space when moving to our next home, I decided to go with tiles that can easily be stacked and stowed away.

In the future, I believe I will go for larger tiles than these 12" x 12" ones, but we'll see.  Additionally, the cuts made at the lumber yard (these are quarter inch thick hardboard, tempored Masonite preferred) weren't very good....the don't line up perfectly, so I'd also try to make sure they're at least true squares in the future.

For texture, I watered down some Elmer's glue (not too much) and brushed it across the tiles.  Then I took a standard bag of sand from Home Depot, scooped some into a fine mesh sieve, and sprinkled across the wet glue (using that bag of sand indoors is quite dusty, be warned).  Following the sand, I randomly distributed a few larger stones here and there.  I placed the tiles outside to dry overnight. 

You can see the glue soaking through the sand

I tried not to go too crazy with larger size grains as I plan to put my buildings directly down onto the tiles 

After they'd dried I sprayed some almond colored paint over the tiles.  When the paint was dry, I flocked small patches of vegetation using standard GamesWorkshop flocking.  

While you see mostly large patches of flock here, I tried to stick with Dime sized speckles as to represent the sporadic shrubs and plants 

These are not the best surfaces ever, but they'll certainly do the trick for now.