How to build a Mordheim board (and in a lot of ways, how NOT to build a Mordheim board)

*starts by blowing the dust off of the blog site and checks it still works (just 😬)

So, as the title suggests we've gone a bit Mordheim crazy down at the club. We're hoping to start a campaign in January 2026 and we've all had our paints out to slap some colour on our warbands. We've even gone as far as to make an entire board and terrain (mainly thanks to Ray) to play on, we even made a trip to FIASCO in Leeds for a demo game with it. Hurrah we said (insert picture of table, not the hurrah).

After the congratulations and well deserved back slapping had lapsed a rather grim thought reared it's ugly head. Will we not need multiple boards to play a fun, yet efficient campaign? The answer dear viewer is "yes" and we tried to think long and hard about cases for the answer not to be yes, but alas we failed. This now means we need to knock out at least 2 more boards and the use of blogger seems a good way of doing it, whilst tracking our progress. So sit back and let me tell you a story about how I'd go about building a board for Mordheim (or other tabletop game for that matter). Some of the practices you're about to see have never seen a Health and Safety audit or in some cases common sense.....so don't blame me if they don't work 😉 

I'm using 50mm deep, 1200mm long and 600mm wide XPS foam for my boards. I like XPS for it's ability to hold texture more than anything and I find it reasonably strong in most cases.

My plan is to texture the boards with a generic cobblestone pattern with two rollers I picked up from Mirfield Miniatures a while back. The rollers work really well, but a note of caution is to wear some work gloves while you roll them. You have to press down pretty hard to get a deep enough texture, hard enough to bruise your palm as I found out 😆

Once I'd textured the boards I chose to both prime and strength them. Using skills I'd picked up in primary school and using cheap toilet paper, ironically found only in school toilets for some reason, I proceeded to papier-mâchè the boards. I split the toilet paper down in to single ply sheets in avoid obscuring the imprinted detail. The glue mix is roughly a third of each PVA, Black Primer with added green and blue craft paint and water. It was then time for a big ol' brush and some year 4 creativity! A side note on drying times and seasonal weather. Huddersfield in October probably isn't an ideal time to try this type of thing in your garage, it really slows the drying time down. Hopefully the next post will show how the boards have fared.

Until next time,

Cheers.