Pulp Alley urban boards

 

 Finally I have gotten around to addressing my woefully inadequate urban/tarmac gaming surface. Good old Dave of Pulp Alley keeps talking about 18" x 18" tiles as a good gaming surface. Well, while he seems to be able to walk into a home store in the US and readily find these tiles it seems to be a bit more of a challenge here in Canada. Even if you can find them they are sold by the case which is not so economical to me. However I did find some tiles on Amazon and then figured out a way to make them double sided, sort of like what Dave does.

So, the tiles I bought have a sort of rock/red desert look to them. They are peel and stick just like Dave recommended.

They are textured and kind of shinny. I was able to deal with the shine with some matt spray varnish that at first looked like it would dry tacky but in the end did not. The texture is subtle, but I believe it will take a good dry brush.

Now Dave uses two tile, back to back to build his boards, but I could not find any other tiles that I felt  I could use. So, I sought out peel and stick vinyl wall paper. There is a lot out there. In the end I bought a large roll of 24" wide peel and stick grey concrete wall paper. I cut the squares larger than 18" x 18" to give myself some wiggle room and to not add stress when attaching the paper to the tile. This was important as with both surfaces being pre-glued there was not going to be much chance to reposition!

So, I made certain that there was an overlapped, which I then trimmed off as shown above. In real life the concrete is a little darker looking but certainly not black. I think it looks better than a dark "newly paved' tarmac.

Then I need some sidewalks. Well there is a peel and stick wallpaper for that too. I chose a whitish grey wallpaper, this time a large roll roughly 15" wide. The reason for this is that I have a large collection of 8.5" x 14" thick cardboard. This allows me to fairly quickly stick on the paper to the cardboard. I then cut the cardboard down to a sheet that is 8" x 12" . The plan is to leave some this size but also cut down some of these sheets into smaller sections maybe 4" x 8", 8" x 8" or even other smaller sizes. The idea being that they would become fully interchangeable.

So far so good. It is a dull but necessary task. I also have two sheets of plastic cobblestone, each roughly 18" x 36". I have now added 'tarmac' to each of them thereby doubling my playing surfaces without any storage consumption.