Miniature World Maker's Dirt Roads

Please sign in to your membership account, or, if you are not yet a member, please sign up for your free membership account.

Miniature World Maker is a company down in Australia that is doing amazing things with latex. We've seen their products at conventions and in stores, but these are our first review samples (thanks to John Gleason over at Miniature Wargames Dot Com, the factory outlet for Miniature World Maker in North America).

The Dirt Road Pack comes in a plastic wrap (not a bag, but a taped wrap). Inside are a bundle of 4 Straight Sections (about 10" long), a bundle of 6 Curved Sections (about the same length), and 4 Junctions (2 T's, 1 Y, and a crossroads). (The "bundles" keep the pieces safe in shipment, but aren't meant for re-use.)

What are they made out of? According to the manufacturer:

The latex material is thick enough to withstand use, but not so thick that you couldn't overlap the road sections if you wanted to. There is a slight odor to the latex, but very faint. Our samples had occasional "bubble" marks or trimming errors, but nothing significant - and the dark color makes errors difficult to spot.

The latex is dark brown, painted with a variety of greens, browns, and blue-greys, and flocked with green "grass." Our samples had grass on both the verges and the roadways, with painted "tracks" added to the road surfaces. The flocking is durable - if you rub the flocked parts, you get some "flock dust" but the main flocking stays put.

The roads are simple to use - just lay them out on the tabletop. The flexibility of the latex means that they can be used over sloped hill pieces so that a road can run up and down a hill. In the example above, we even overlapped two curved pieces to get a tighter curve (see top-left corner).

The road pieces are advertised as 15/20mm scale. In this scale, a T-34 tank fills the road from side to side. The roads also seem useful in 1/285 and 1/300 gaming, being wide enough for two vehicles side-by-side.