I made seven of the ‘official’ Wiz-War boards out of birch plywood. I used 1/4″ for the base, 1/8″ for the walls, and 1/16″ for the doors.
I settled on making the boards eight inches across. I made laser cutter templates to etch and cut the boards. The square in the center is for a token to indicate the color of the player’s home base. All bases were stained a different color, sometimes by mixing the stains.
For the walls, I sprayed stone paint on the 1/8″ plywood. Don’t spray the entire board like I did at first. It’s a waste of moderately expensive paint. You could also get the effect with the flick method which would be cheaper, but more time consuming. After cutting the walls, I etched a stone pattern in each. I created several wall designs with various algorithms and brick patterns. I wanted every board to have a different pattern. Two methods that I learned for random stones are Voronoi diagrams and Wang tiles (in case you want to try it yourself).
Next came gluing everything together. If the walls were too flimsy, say from cutting the design too deep, I added a coat of watered school glue which dries clear and seeps into all the cracks. This can also be used to paint the bottoms of walls that are a little wobbly. It’s easier to glue all the inside walls before the outer ones. Clamping the inside walls can be a bit of an art. The best results I got for the outer walls was clamping between some woofer magnets and the back plate of a drill press tray. And of course, some walls didn’t hold well enough and had to be re-glued.
After everything was attached, I added a few coats of acrylic sealer. In the end, some things worked, some things not so well. Use my files only as a guide. Double check everything ’cause sometimes I had to shave off a bit here or there and I sometimes missed some walls. Hopefully, you’ll get an idea on how to make your own boards.
Final notes: There were two ideas I thought about and dropped. One was to make the boards like a woodworker’s checkerboard project with different types of wood. I quickly realized I didn’t have the tools or the patience for this. Another idea was to use wireless LEDs in the wizard tokens so they would glow. The problem with this is I’d have to wire each board for 12V no matter their orientation. However, it might be possible to make a larger board, filled with coils, that all the boards will sit on. I’ll let you know.
Some other fails besides regluing: I missed some walls on the second board I made. Luckily, I was able to glue them to the board just fine.
