"Crops and fields, a gold mine of freebees!" Topic

I know this is far from a new idea and I know that I'm far from being the first gamer to discover this.

However for me personally, I never thought of free samples as being a practical, useful thing for wargaming terrain. In all my years of going to Home Depot for terrain-building supplies, I never bothered to visit the carpeting and flooring sections of the store.

Big mistake! My assumption about free samples was always that they must be like tiny little 1" swatches or squares or something, and not really usable for anything.

I think I saw the freebee samples mentioned by another TMP member in a post a few weeks back, so they get credit for steering me in this direction.

What to my surprise when I went to Home Depot last week!!

The carpeting samples are amazing! They are a full 4" square and of course you can take as many as you want. Now it might feel a bit awkward taking a pile of samples home and not buying anything but…I mean…technically they ARE free and you don't have to necessarily be taking them for actual home carpeting or flooring projects. :)

What really blew me away though is that they come in virtually every shade of brown and green, they look like perfectly scaled crops and gardens perfect for 6mm or 15mm gaming. However you could also glue several of these to a larger base to make a bigger square for larger scale games.

Perfect for historicals or fantasy.

One of the coolest built-in details is that some of the samples are from a carpeting pattern that has like these corduroy-type textures to them that look EXACTLY like plowed earth!

Any way, here's some pics of what I'm talking about. I ended up grabbing about 20 of these overall, lol:

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Oh boy, my wife is not going to be happy with me the next time we go to home depot. She's going to call me an embarrassment as I walk out with a handful.

I walk out with a handful of these every trip to HD. Even though I now have more than would fit on the game table.

@Private Matter,

LOL, yep…I managed to get twenty of them in four stacks which I stuffed under my arm while whistling out the door :P

I can't get over how perfectly sized and scaled they are especially for 6mm historical gaming! I mean they are literally an accidental, ready-made wargaming product that you don't even have to base or paint!

Another thing in Home Depot which is a great deal are their doormats. Yes, you have to buy these BUT – they sell the coir fiber mats for about $10.00 USD. The prices online for coir fiber mats are much higher generally, and with one mat you have enough wheat fields to last a lifetime. I got one mat and cut about twenty decently-sized wheat field pieces from it.

Best part is that the vinyl backing is like a brownish/black color which lays perfectly flat on the tabletop and doesn't even really need any flocking because it looks like soil underneath the "wheat"!

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Off to Home Depot tonight after work! I wonder if my veteran's discount will apply to free samples…?

I happen to running a 28mm ACW game this evening and I need more scenery. The fact that I have to drive right my a Home Depot to get to my FLGS where I am running the game is a bonus.

Buck
if you ask nicely I am sure that they will gladly give you 10% off the free price.

Hmmmmmmm

I've been toying (read: staring idly at) with some countertop samples from Homely Despot, whose backs are a fine-grained texture that might be suitable for decking, planking, flooring, etc, if you can get rid of the label adhesive.