Warrior Heroes–Adventures in Talomir, like many games by Two Hour Wargames, offers two options for a gaming table. The first is a fairly typical 3′ by 3′ gaming table, divided into nine equal sections (see p. 40 of WHAT). The other is the Battle Board (p. 102), an 8.5″ by 11″ standard letter-sized piece of paper.

For me and my gaming situation, the larger table is a little big for my space, while the Battle Board seems really small and penalizing ranged fighters, not to mention curtailing some aspects of tactical moving. In addition, I like making terrain, but do not necessarily want to be unpacking loads of it for every encounter that might turn into combat.

My solution is to try out what I am calling a “Battle Board XL” which represents a compromise between the two: small enough to have on a regular table, but large enough to give a sense of space and scenery. In addition, I would like to keep this cheap, since it is just an experiment. I’ll give myself bonus points for flexibility and ease of use as well.

With that quest in mind, I set out for a website that sell cheap, mass-produced items of very low quality that rhymes with “emu.” And as luck would have it, I found what I was looking forward, plus got suckered into buying some other stuff I didn’t need to get free shipping.

First up were these makeup brushes that I had heard would be great for drybrushing, rather than ruining real paint brushes. Cost: $1.89.

A pack of small microfiber towels never hurts, and I already used them to clean up a spill from my painting water cup. Cost: $2.07.

Now we get in to the meat of it: a 24″ x 16″ brown mousepad to serve as the battlemat. They come in a lot of colors, but I opted for a good neutral brown. Cost: $7.48.

Didn’t I mention I added a few things onto my shopping cart to get me over the line to free shipping, including these liners for my air fryer. This item had a tragically unfortunate misspelling on its label though….

Here is the mat laid flat. Not terribly fancy and it is not particularly spongy, but for what I need it fits the bill.

So I used the new brushes to lightly drybrush in loose swirls some earth-toned craft paints I had lying around to break up the monotony of the brown mat. Nothing too detailed–I want it to seem reasonable as both an indoor and outdoor surface.

Here is the final look, complete with some new terrain I painted up and a few of the miniatures I have featured here recently. In terms of terrain placement, I considered just using two terrain types for the board: one dominant and one secondary. I also want to add a few more options to the sparse few in the WHAT rulebook.

Here is a closeup of the terrain, which I printed up on my Ender 3 v2 and painted. They are from the Ruins of Generica by Devious Games. I backed the Kickstarter ages ago, and they are just perfect scatter terrain to represent classic fantasy ruins. I wanted to only make enough pieces to fill a PLA filament box for easy storage, and you can see how I do not need much to create the desired effect.

Thoughts? Feedback? Comments always welcome!