So from time to time there has been a need for roads in a game. In past experiences we’ve gone about making road in a bunch of different ways. One of the easiest ones we did was to simply buy brown spray paint and spray the roads directly onto our play surface at the time (this was a wood table top at the time). While that method was effective at the time it was always the same and we had exactly the same play surface over time. This is one of the reasons we started to make things modular as time went on. Department 56 offers an entire roll of this vinyl cobblestone surface, and when you buy stuff like this after the holidays, it’s really cheap.
Each piece was cut into a rough sections as follows 8 inch sections with each piece being 3 inches wide. All of the bases are roughly 1/2 inch thick and unevenly cut to give the appearance of an uneven road.
The reason for these sizes were to ensure that the road covered the entirety of the board so we weren’t ‘Short’ by a few inches on one side of the table. It also means that we can make as many different road layouts as we can imagine.
What’s nice about this overall setup is that if you want a series of roads as shown or just a simple road from one end to the other these pieces work wonderfully for that.
On another side note, after having done this, a couple of revelations came to me about how to better make a road system to use for wargaming. The first is that .5 inches actually a large incline to go up onto a road, something thinner would have been a much better option, perhaps something in the 1/4 to 3/8’s thickness. Having cut those pieces of river out of plywood really brought me a new realization to making terrain. These roads would be less fragile (the edges that is) if this were mounted on wood. Also, the fit between each piece would a much tighter fit than they are currently. While you can’t win them all, it’s definitely some ideas that would be definite changes if I were to do them all over again.
*EDIT*
Now with properly sized images!