"Where have all the hills gone?" Topic

Big Lee's video here, further entertains the question put forward about Salute 52 (and maybe a trend in general) – where have all the hills gone?

YouTube link

A good topic.

Weirdly, down here in the southern hemisphere I woke up at 0300 this morning and found myself thinking how to make decent hills for my table. The only thing I can think of is terrain boards. I think I need more sleep.

Mattress foam! It was good enough for Larry Brom, I've used it for years.

Mattress foam! It was good enough for Larry Brom, I've used it for years.

Do you carve it into hill shapes and cover it with a base cloth?

I use mattress foam, too; 1" thick. (I *think* we're talking about the same thing here.) Cut it into shapes and spray paint for mottled browns and greens. It's lightweight and easy to transport but it's difficult to store very large pieces (takes up a lot of room, but what doesn't?) I like the versatility, you can set up all different layouts unlike a pre-made terrain board. I also cut some edge and corner pieces as well as generic irregular ovals and circles and ridges.

Here are pics of two approaches I have used.

First, over a period of years I developed the approach of carving up corrugated cardboard to build hills.

The advantages of this approach were several:

- The material was readily available and basically free. Lots of items are bought and brought into my home in cardboard boxes over the course of a year. Rather than suffering the hassle of disposing of the boxes, I just cut them into various shapes.

- Hills can be made of a very wide variety of heights, slope shapes, and complexity. Sometimes I glued a progression of smaller similar shapes into a fixed multi-level hill. Other times I just left them in random shapes to be combined at game-time.

- It's really easy at game time to adjudicate what is a steep slope, a gentle slope, what level is above what other level, and whether a vehicle is hull-down or fully hidden. Simple rules can be applied, like: 1. In contact against the edge = hull down, back from the edge = turret down. 2. < 1cm between edges = steep slope, > 1cm = gentle slope.

- I have gamed with a lot of vets over the years. They are all quite accustomed to topo maps with elevation lines. It was an instantly recognizable table top, and I could provide maps based of the table or build the table based on topo maps (if I wanted to go to that extent).

Then, I became a student of Mark Luther's method (Microbiggie on these fora) of building terrain, where the game cloth is placed over the elevations and held down with sticky stuff (double-stick tape or ticky-tack plasticene), and slopes, roads, waterways etc. are then drawn on with pastels. Oooh, very useful way of doing terrain.

I get all the benefits of my cut-cardboard approach, with a more visually appealing end result.

I can do maps of pretty much any complexity. I can easily set up boards with lots of little rolling hills, some higher hills (I've done 5 or 6 levels in my pre-glued, and assembled 8 or 10 levels ad hoc on occasion), some multi-faceted hills (two or three peaks with saddles in-between, etc.), some ridge lines. I can use large flat pieces to make make one or two high base-levels across the table with some relief channels (wadis, river tracks, sunken roads), all pretty much at will.

The only point where it fails me is very high hills or mountainous terrain. For that I would need to cut styrofoam or similar material, and put it on top of the cloth. Otherwise the cloth will be unable to stick (without lots of wrinkles or bunched up material) to the peaks, the slopes, and the flat portions of the game table.

-Mark
(aka: Mk 1)

I think it (the lack of hills) is an artifact of tournament type games like FoW and 40k.

In those, one rarely sees hills and towns are always a crossroad.

We almost always have hills on our miniature battlefields. Can't imagine having a miniature battlefield without one or more of them.

Jim

Yeah, I can't recall a game that I have run or played in that hasn't had hills or elevation changes. Though I do not play in tournaments, and I am only now getting into skirmish gaming.
Things could be different going forward in skirmish gaming…. It is easier to have a regiment of line infantry stay upright on an actual slope than a single based figure

You always need some good high ground.

I do the same Thats piper does. Cut it into shapes and spray paint appropriate colors.

I now use towels under my mat for hills. You can make them any shape and height you want. Infinite variety. I do a lot of historical scenarios and this is helpful in recreating actual specific battlefield terrain.

I usually put a layer of what my wife who grew up in Scotland calls tea towels between the hill and the game mat. In other words, over the hill, but under the mat. This gives a better surface it seems.

Not my original idea. David Ensteness uses towels when he runs his ESR games at conventions.

Tom

Depends on scale and rules. There's GeoHex at one end and corrugated paper with clump foliage cut into hexagons at the other. In between, there's sloped or "wedding cake" styrofoam.

Just back from Huzzah, no shortage of hills of all styles on the game tables over here.

My original gaming tabletop was made out of something called beaver board. It was about 1/2 inch thick compressed paper/wood pulp.

About 40 years ago, I built a new gaming table out of plywood.

The old table top was cut into irregular pieces for use as hills. It's not that heavy and can be stacked. I set up the hills and cover them with the ground cloth.

I don't believe I ever have a game without hills.

As Robert Piepenbrink notes, "Depends on scale and rules." The bigger the scale, the less area is represented on the table, so the more likely it is that the area represented is pretty flat.

Robert P. and Oberlindes Sol LIC also make some good hobby observations.

Perhaps we might be seeing fewer hills in games because the 'battlefields' have shrunken?

This battle space is now just a couple of hedgerows long max., or a few blocks of superb-looking buildings.

I liked the look of GeoHex, but another discussion here recently on TMP went into all the reasons why some folks loved it, some still used it, and how some abandoned it.