"Improvised terrain" Topic

We've all seen the beautiful terrain featured at various wargames' shows. However, in the privacy of our own homes or at a standard club night, we've probably, in a moment of desperation, used mundane, non-wargaming items to complete a tabletop..

What's the most unlikely item you've ever pressed into service as terrain, an objective, or a marker?

I'm thinking books as hills, mugs as redoubts, biscuit tins as factories, boxes as ridgelines — that sort of thing. Swamps made from sponges, rivers from ribbon, bridges from rulers, mugs as buildings — I suspect we've all improvised at some point.

So, spill the beans (which could make decent rocky ground??). Bonus points if it actually worked… or if it was eaten, drunk, or put back on a shelf mid-game. Any photographic proof will be welcome & not used against you in a court of law.

I'm assuming you don't mean ordinary objects that are painted or otherwise gussied up, because there's no end to the usefulness of stuff once it's primed black and drybrushed. I also assume you're not referring to objects placed under a groundcloth to make hills.

Hmm, I've cut up sandpaper into strips to serve as dirt roads, does that count?

We used to play combat inside spaceships using books as the (sealed) rooms and fighting through the gaps between them (corridors)

Hardly ever. I remember decades ago having to construct a stone wall out of dice. Poor packing on my part. Scenario terrain is always based on terrain currently in my possession.

Mind you, it hasn't always been pretty. Time and the absense of games has improved it quite a bit. (If the best is the enemy of the good, believe me that "next Saturday" is the enemy of "good looking." Or, as the engineers say: "Good, Cheap, Fast. Pick two.")

Terrain items I can think of is using 8 1/2" by 11" blank paper as building blocks and drawing squares on them for individual buildings and popsicle sticks for dungeon walls for a D&D game. Figurewise the funniest one I recall is a guy forgot his overall commander for an ACW game and one of the players donated his California Raisin toy from his Hardee's junior meal as the substitute.

I haven't hit much desperations, I guess. Masking tape for roads. Pennies for manhole covers.

I guess over time, we build up an inventory of bespoke terrain pieces. However, as your tales attest, it wasn't always so.

I, too, used lengths of cork for roads. The damned stuff never lay flat!

gamertom's substitute story is a gem. It's stuff like this remember about a game

I used torn up bits of the convention program as a substitute for ruined building templates that I couldn't find then found later after the game.

Crumpled wads of paper for partial destruction/impassable and torn scattered flat pieces for full destruction/movement penalty.

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We do run a "shrunken superheroes" scenario where players grab objects from the room to fill the table, then write the terrain effects for them. Regular terrain is distributed by random draw from players then the objective markers.

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It's not on the spot improvised, but the OP mentioned eating the terrain, so our annual post-Christmas-gingerbread-houses-are-on-sale-kaiju game might count:

inlgames.com/kaijucookie.htm

I ran a couple of kids games using Wooden Warriors as the rules. 80mm wooden flats that were killed when they were knocked down by throwing a small ball at them. I built forts out of Oreo and other cookie packets (the ones that come with 4 or 6 cookies or crackers). Whoever held the objective at the end of the game got to keep it. One kid charged the remaining 2 cuirassiers with his 4 men artillery crew to try to capture the Nutter Butters redoubt.

Hmm. Not my game, but I remember having to help out someone else who'd missed something on his packing checklist by making houses out of copy paper, scissors and paper clips. (Someone found glue later, which helped.) Not my best buildings, but normally I have a range of materials and I'm not doing it while the host is setting up the game.

As a kid I drew my battlefields on chipboard with different coloured chalk.
Very 2 dimensional but some actually looked ok.