Friday 28 May 2021

How to make Cheap Wargame Hills

A few weeks ago I made some prototype hills just to work out how I wanted to do them. The intention all along was to make a large batch of foam hills to fulfil my gaming needs for many years to come. With the arrival of a new batch of XPS Foam, I set about the task of cutting, sanding, painting, and then applying the static grass. The whole project took just a couple of days, most of that being drying time. 

Enough hills to give me plenty of terrain choices

The build was so simple, and low cost, that I decided to make a very short tutorial video on my work process. If you have wavered over making your own hills for the games table then this short film will show you just how easy they were to make



For those that are interested, here is a list of the raw materials I used and a cost for the whole project.

XPS Foam (A3 20mm thick) £10.00 *
4x Bags of Javis Spring/Autumn Static Grass £14.00
500ml Bottle PVA Glue £2.00
2x200ml Tubes Burnt Umber Artists Acrylic £4.00
Total Cost £30

*This low unit cost was achieved by buying a much larger pack and stashing half of it away for use in future projects. One can never have enough foam! 

I hope you found the video useful and if you have never made foam hills before give it a try. You'll be amazed at how easy they were to make and how much money you'll save. 

8 comments:

  1. Great video Big Lee, you’ve got me thinking. Not sure on selling the boss on the hot foam cutter given the stickiness.

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    1. Thanks Peter. I love my foam cutter (another recent purchase) and I found it to be a lot less messy than using a knife. I little smelly, but not too obnoxious compared to some of the other smells that waft from my Operations Room!!

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    2. Well you do associate with Ray! How well does the static grass stay put under gaming and or storage conditions? I always find mine sheds badly.

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    3. It seems to well stuck. I use a thick coat of good quality PVA for a good bond.

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  2. Good, functional hills for wargaming.

    Are you sure it was an A3 sheet of foam? That looks more than 297mm x 420mm worth of hills to me!

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    1. Yes some was A3 sheet, some of which I have cut down to A4 for ease of storage and use later.

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  3. Hi Lee, Did a search for XPS foam and came up with loads of hits.. do you have a link to a supplier. Cheers.

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    1. I got mine from Bluefoam via Amazon. Buying in bulk is the bext way to get the price down...so long as you have space for storage!

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