Building The Lonely Mountain Part 1

For the upcoming gaming convention, Cold Wars, we are putting on The Battle of Five Armies. This will not be the wildly off the rails Peter Jackson version, but the Tolkien version as best we can translate a book into a wargame. Some visual inspiration from the Hobbit movies, might find their way in as well, as the movies are an awesome spectacle of Middle-Earth.

But first we have to build a battlefield. So follow along as we build Erebor. Feel free to ask questions or give us feedback as we go along. Also you can click on the pictures for bigger versions of each picture.

 Our battlefield will be 6x10. I had to add a folding table to the end of my normal 5x8 table. Covered with vinyl to protect my flocked gaming table.

 After a trip to Home Depot, we picked up 8, 2x8 sheets of foam insulation. We cut 5 of them down to 6 feet and that is our base.

 Sometimes the tongue and groove of the boards are a little off, so we spent sometime arranging the boards to find the best fit for each seam. The boards are numbered, and each seam has a mark so we can line up the boards if we take them apart.

Now we lay out the edge of the mountain spurs that forms the valley and the course of the River Running. We use glass beads so we can adjust on the fly till we are satisfied with the placement of terrain features. Once we are happy with the layout we mark all the lines with a Sharpie Pen.

 How we start cutting more foam that will form our mountain spurs, the main gate and Dale.

 Another angle

 Cutting the foam to make the slopes.

 Laying out test pieces to get a feel for placement and scale of the main gate,

 We have cut and scraped down the first level of the spurs. We are ready for Glue.

Using Liquid Nails, we glue down the foam spurs to the base. We will add at least one more layer for parts of the spurs, and Raven Hill. Then we can start on the Mountain itself.

We leave the glue to dry overnight.

Check back for further updates as we build the battlefield, rules updates, and we get our armies together.

Xin