Foam Floor Mat Terrain - Part 1

Despite my love of hexes I'm increasingly seeing square grids as more usable for many (most) periods and settings. We're also beginning to look more closely at our Waterloo game planned for 2021 and at 1cm=100m the cost of Hexon is somewhat over £2000! I do like modular terrain though so I started thinking about the sort of foam floor tiles you get for gyms, play areas and workshops. Google turned up a few people who've done this for wargaming so I thought it worth some experimentation to see if it was viable.

My first thought was for 30cm squares, which could then be dot marked to 10cm for play. This size would be nice as you could get a building or small wood on a square, and road/rivers would work well too. But on a big table that would be a huge number of squares with lots of joins, and 30cm squares seem far more expensive than 60cm.

With 60cm there would be less scope for "terrain dioramas", but 1/10th (roughly) the squares and joins, and a lot cheaper, so that's what I decided to try.

I looked at online suppliers, but one warning from TMP was that everyone is different in how the interlock works, so if you buy some now off eBay the chances of matching are slim later. And they are bulky to post. I therefore went for the Halfords one as they were just as cheap as online (£10 for 6), and there is more chance of them sticking with the same supplier. For Waterloo I reckon we'd need ~20-30 packs so could probably arrange a bulk order!

Luckily although they have a high-grip moulding on one side the other side is totally plain. For a start I wanted to look at texturing to I did 1/4 in sand and 1/2 with grout.

I'd picked up some spray at Halfords (although will use paint in volume) and sprayed green, and then tried 3 different flocks I had to hand, my standard static grass, a Noch turf, and some random flocks.

I was massively surprised at how evenly the static grass went down - it looked as good as a Hexon hex. I'd initially discounted this approach, but seeing how good it looks I might change my mind. I can blend some darker flocks in to get more variation than Hexon, and it will go really well with my bases.

The textured surface was totally lost under the flock, so don't think I'll do that.

The flocks were poor - but that may just be the flock. I'll go away and look at some terrain videos to get a good mix of paints and flock and method, and compare that to a multi-shade static grass approach. I reckon the grass will cost about £2 a square, cf £1.75 for the square itself - but still cheaper than Hexon and I only need to flock the top levels.

Really happy with how the joins on the edges (eg the edge trim at top above) blend in.

Another question was how well can I make hills. I found the material sliced really nicely with a sharp Stanley knife, so no problems there. May be issues with keeping orientation and interlocking. Next challenge is roads/rivers (although happy to have those as standalone items).

One question is going to be whether for Waterloo I just do standard pieces which we use to get a best fit, or sculpt the contour edge pieces, or a hybrid. Need to do a square grid overlay on my Waterloo master map.

The other key question is how well the rules will play out on 10cm squares instead of 10cm hexes. Should be just a case of redefining movement and flanks. I'm a great fan of "no two diagonals in a row" and may keep with that. Will have a test game shortly.

That's it for now, will report back when I've tried a few more ideas out, but looking far better than I expected.