(The following article comes from John Fleisher…)

I’ve started a project to create a replica of the original Steve Jackson Games “Ogre” map, using Heroscape tiles and a lot of time.

If you are not familiar with the Ogre game, here’s a link…

I was cleaning out the dungeon (I mean the basement gameroom) the other day and found a couple of boxes of Heroscape that I had picked up at a thrift store for a few bucks. Looking at the hex tiles used to make maps for the game, a thought occurred to me.

I dug out my original 1977 Metagaming Ogre game and looked at the map.

Hmmmm…too plain.  I dug out my SJG pocket box edition of Ogre and found the color map that I remembered so well. Perfect.

The Heroscape tiles are about 1.5″ across the flats, so all the Ogre minature vehicles would fit, except Ogres of course. Creating this board will be good practice for building my ultimate Ogre board, with 4″ hexes that will completely hold even the largest of the Ogre miniatures. That board has been in the back of my mind ever since I saw the Hexon II products for the first time.

The Hexon stuff looks great, but is very expensive, so I’m still pondering cheaper solutions.

One possibility is some hexagonal ceramic tiles that I have stashed away from a previous project. I found the tiles at a discount building supply store about 20 years ago, when I was playing Star Fleet Battles with the Starline 2200 miniatures. I hated the way the ships took up several hexes on the mapsheets, and decided to do something about it.

The tiles were about 4.25″ across the flats and pure white. So I started by spraying all 400 of them Krylon Ultra Flat Black. As you can imagine this took a while. Once all of them were dry I sprayed them with a clear acrylic coat to keep them from getting scratched up.

After letting them dry again I did a trial setup on the dining room table. They looked good, but I was worried about the rough ceramic on the backs of the tiles scratching my table. So, after a trip to the craft store for a pile of green felt squares, I started hot gluing tiles to felt sheets (4 per sheet) and then when they were cool, I cut around the hexes with scissors.

Perfect. No scratching and I could stack them for storage without worrying about them getting all scratched up. Not sure why I chose green felt though, black would have made more sense, but the green barely shows between the tiles.

I found some cardboard boxes for storage/transport of the tiles and packed them up for my next convention game. When I picked up one of the boxes I realized why ceramic tile hexes had not caught on before, these things are heavy! Each box is probably about 30 pounds, and I have 6 boxes of them.

They look great laid out on a table though, and since they are heavy they don’t move around too much. They are even geomorphic, so if the battle starts to move towards one end of the table, you can move them around.

If I can find some more tiles like these, I may use them for my big Ogre board. If not, I may repaint these or something.

Anyway, back to the Heroscape tile Ogre board.

The original Ogre map is 15 hexes “wide” by 22 hexes “tall”. Duplicating it with the HS tiles makes it about 24″ wide by 36″ tall. Not too huge.

I looked around my garage for something to mount it on and found a hollow core door left by the previous owners of my house. Apparently at some point someone had kicked or punched the door and put a hole through one side. They had replaced the door, but why they kept the old one is beyond me, so I grabbed my circular saw and ripped the door in half, disposing of the broken piece.

I pulled a bunch of the HS tiles out of the box and started fitting them together. The tiles come in several colors (no big deal, I’m painting them anyway) and several shapes including a single hex, 2 hex, 3 hex, 7 hex, and a big 24-hex unit. After some study, I had a hex map the same size as the original Ogre map. All it needed now was some terrain features.

The tiles fit together fairly well, but I was worried about separation issues once I got a few layers of paint on the board. So I brushed some plastic model cement (Ambroid ProWeld) along the seams to connect everything together. There were some gaps between the tiles where the sculpted edges fit together, I filled those with PVA glue. After letting the whole thing dry overnight I discovered that both glues had seeped down the cracks to the base and now the map was solidly mounted to its base. Cool. A side effect I had not planned on.

I had some Sculpey left over from previous projects so I dug that out and started rolling out some pieces to make the craters and hills. I was not sure how to do this so I started by making a test crater on a piece of scrap plastic.

You have to bake Sculpey in an oven at 275 degrees for 15 minutes or so to get it to harden. After baking, the crater looked perfect. I used a razor blade to separate it from the plastic and glued it down to my 7-hex “testbed” with PVA.

After the PVA dried I took the test piece up to the garage and sprayed the whole thing with Krylon gray primer. While it was still wet I sprinkled it liberally with Woodland Scenics fine railroad ballast for texture. After the primer dried I shook off the excess ballast and then sprayed it with clear Krylon acrylic to glue things down.

After another drying session I checked to see how well the ballast was stuck on, scraping my fingernail across the hex did not dislodge any ballast. I was starting to think this might work.

I mixed some tan and orange acrylic craft paint together for a test. It went on fairly well, but I had to scrub a little to get coverage. After that dried I drybrushed the test piece a little to bring out some of the highlights. I painted some details on the crater, nothing fancy, just enough to see what it looked like.

I sanded the flat hexboard lightly to give the paint and Sculpey something to stick to, and then sprayed the board with a light coat of gray primer to see what needed touching up. Then I spent a couple of hours forming walls and craters out of Sculpey, and making the board match up to the map. When I finished I had something similar to this:

I’ve left out a couple of events, let’s just say that the HS tiles and a heatlamp don’t mix well. Since I stuck the Sculpey to the board, it was too big to fit into my oven. So I attempted to harden the Sculpey using a heatlamp. Apparently the HS tiles have a lower melting point than I would have thought. Sorry, no pics of the damage.

After removing the melted section of the board and redoing a few craters and walls I was ready to continue. I rigged up a blow dryer over the board and let it run for a while, pointing it at different areas of the board. I found that the Sculpey hardened in about 15 minutes. WooHoo! Next time I’ll buy a house with a bigger oven.

Well, that’s the current state of things. This weekend I plan to put a coat of latex paint on the board and sprinkle the ballast on the whole board.

Well, for a change I actually accomplished what I planned. I found a leftover can of green latex from the living room, and put a coat on the board. I let it sit overnight with a fan pointed at it so that it would be sure to dry.

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The next day it looked pretty good, with just a couple of spots that needed touch up. My original plan was to coat the board with the green paint, then sprinkle ballast on it. But I noticed the paint was drying really fast, so I would have to do it in sections.

I decided to use some spray acrylic sealer I had instead. I sprayed about 1/3 of the board, then sprinkled ballast on about 1/4 of the board, leaving an area open so that I could blend things together.

This worked well, so I finished up the whole board and let it sit for a few hours to dry. When I came back to it I tilted the board up vertically and let all the excess ballast run off onto my makeshift table. I swept up the excess for reuse. Some areas of the board had not fully covered, so I sprayed and ballasted them again. This process went on for several repetitions, until I ended up with this:

Looks pretty good to me. I’m letting it dry overnight again and then I will brush off some of the loose ballast and clean things up a little, then coat the whole thing with clear acrylic again. The gray ballast has a neat appearance, I might have to do something in the future with it to make a lunar landscape.

My next decision is the base color for the board, I’m thinking I will go a bit lighter than the red-orange used in the Ogre mapsheet above, so it looks more realistic (to my eyes, anyway).

I decided to use tan and brown washes to get the appearance I am looking for. I mixed some tan craft paint with water at 4:1 to get a thin wash and sprayed the board with my airbrush.

I painted heavier around the craters and ridgelines to accentuate them.

After the tan wash dried with the help of my portable fan, I mixed up a much darker brown wash at the same proportions.

I thought it looked pretty good, so I let it dry for a few hours under the fan again. When it was dry I sprayed it with matte acrylic sealer. The next step is drybrushing the craters and ridges to give them character. But first…

I just wanted to set up some miniatures to get a feel for how things would look…

OK, it’s been a while since my last update, but I think it’s looking pretty good. After a few drybrushing sessions (and by a few I mean dozens) the details started showing up pretty well.

I went ahead and painted the edges of the board black to give it a more finished look. I also gave it a couple more light coats of acrylic sealer, and then a dusting of matte sealer to get rid of the shine. Here’s a couple of close up shots of the craters.

I think it turned out rather well. I’m looking forward to playing a few games on it soon. Now I just need to get busy and finish painting my Ogre miniatures… all 600 of them.

I think I’ll do a separate article on that little task….