How To: City Board

I've wanted a city board for Kings of War for quite some time.  All the blocking terrain from buildings and street fights seem like it would be a fun time.  I took the opportunity to make it mach my fancy pants humans as well with white brick streets and dirt with scattered grassy patches.

Here's a final pic of the board in action during a game of Haggis (and without the snow throing off my color!):

I started as I do with all my boards using a 8' x 4' piece of MDF board from Lowes cut down to two 4' x 4' sections.  This makes it MUCH easier to store as you can just prop it up vertically behind a book shelf or some nook. 

I glued streets down made from Department 56 roll out christmas village streets.  You can find these online all year round though right around or after Christmas time is the best because you can get them for SUPER cheap and just stock up.

In their natural form they look like this (cobblestone one picture I used the brick version)

After glueing down the basic form it was time to prime (in cold temperatures no less).  I also made sure to have a long road delineating the 6' mark (shown on the left hand side) for a standard game size.

For these boards I have found that a big old jar of Apple Barrel Matte Black paint does the trick.  Just water it down a bit and grab your largest brush!  Don't worry about getting it perfectly even or even fully covering it just give the spray paint a good surface to grab onto.

Conversely you can use about 4 - 6 cans of spray paint to prime it which cost WAY more money and takes much longer surprisingly.

After priming the board I took a grey texture pain.  The Rustoleum paints work really well for this (usually though sometimes the cans are bad and won't spray).  Sadly I forgot a picture of this!  I just sprayed them over any of the open ground not really worrying about the streets getting a bit of overspray.  This will give you a nice rough texture on the board and it means you don't have to get the sand and glue out at all!

Apologies for color as we go along.  The snow really messed with the color settings on my camera.  the next step was to block out the streets and add the first layer of paints.  Using a grey spray paint I went over all the streets being sure to over spray quite a bit.  The overspray will be covered up later with other layers.  What you don't want to do is leave a lot of primer on the streets showing as this will simply look silly. 

I sprayed more grey onto the other flat areas of the ground.  This will start creating highlights in random patches as we layer the other colors on later.  Keep the can moving the whole time you don't want an even coverage of the ground as the variation caused by a moving spray will pay off later creating an illusion of patches of dirt and grass.

Next up I went back over the streets with a White spray paint.  again keep the can moving and don't try to cover.  Think of it more as a dusting of white to make the streets stand out and almost be 'drybrushed' from afar.  You can actually just go in and dry brush it but I can tell you that will take a good amount of time.

Next up I tried to cover up part of the street overspray with the first layer of brown.   Let a bit spray into the streets to dirty them up but be careful that you don't let too much get on the streets.  This will take a bit of practice so get familiar with the spray can before moving on.

Next is the first layer of dirt  over the whole board.  This is where the street overspray gets covered up the most and the ground begins to take shape.  Just keep that brown spray paint moving and don't let it linger in any one spot for more than a millisecond!

Now back to the white spray paint I went over the streets again to clean them up a little.  This will also blend the overflowing dirt from the previous step a little bit but be careful not to overspray into the brown portions now.

In addition I used another layer of white on the ground just lightly spraying and moving fast. This will create more variance as we move onto the next step again.

And the next step is another dusting of brown on the ground!  The white will mix in a bit and create lighter patches of dirt.  This is all about building up layers and getting the variance baked in.

Now we start building up some grass using the same methods as before but with green.  Make sure to be careful as you get close to the roads though!

As an even lighter coat I used a bright green to add some depth to the green as the next layer.

After another layer of dark green and a really light bright green I went back and did another 'dusting' of brown to finalize the board.  All the layers add up to created a bit of depth to the board without really requiring a ton of time.

and that's it!  Make sure you don't tip the boards to early either and let them lay flat.  If you don't paint that didn't dry may run as there as lots of layers of paint on that board now.

The majority of the time was building the streets after that it's about a 30-40 minute endeavor to paint it up.  If you just want to make a basic grass board as well you can easily just skip the streets and keep to the other steps making it an even faster project.


Other than the streets this is how I approach almost all of my boards and it give you a reasonably good looking project in a low amount of time.  Hope it helps!