Snowy dirt roads

Normally when I make gaming boards the roads are a set feature on them. Basically they cannot be moved at all as they are part of the board. For this project I wanted to do make some roads that I could place differently from game to game if I wanted to.

I looked at numerous blogs to try and figure out which materials I should use. Normally I would just use cardboard, but I knew that that would not work since I was going to put my snowmix on it and it most definately would warp. Looking through my materials an idea came to me. I had some cheap plastic place mats from IKEA that I had used as cutting mats. They would be sturdy enough and still not make the road look like it was too high compared to the ground.

My first task was to cut the place mats into road shapes. I found out that I could make two straight pieces and a curved piece from each place mat, giving me a total of six pieces. This could easily fit the length of the 4x4 board that I plan to use.

After the cutting was done, I made a portion of my snowmix and applied it to the long edges of each piece. The idea behind this was that I needed to make sure that the dirt road was visible on the table while at the same time making it look like it was still covered with snow.

With the snowmix dry I started to paint the pieces. It took several layers before the original red and green colour of the mats was not visible.

The next day I applied a thinned down layer of PVA glue and sprinkeled a small portion of gravel on the roads themselves. I wanted to make sure that the roads were visible enough on the board.

The final touch was to seal everything in with a layer of mat varnish, applied via a spray can.

Looking at the now I am very pleased with the results as they both look the part and will be flexible enough to place them whereever I want on the board.