At my local store, we recently celebrated the fifth anniversary of the Most Extreme Annihilation Challenge, our annual 20pt mangled metal tournament that features robots and monsters tearing each other apart amidst the strangest missions I can come up with. During the four-round event, three of the scenarios rotate from year to year– past favourites have included:

• Fight in a giant bowl with a hole in the middle. Models tumble toward the center every time they move unless they find something to hang onto.
• Control a trench that has a massive lava boulder rolling back and forth through it.
• Battle across a lava river spanned only by a rapidly-crumbling bridge.
• Control a zone surrounded by crystal formations that random spew fire, lightning, and ice across the battlefield.

I have a lot of fun coming up with these. 🙂

In the middle of all of this chaos, however, there is always one consistent occurrence. Each year, in the third round, the various teams of homicidal monsters and pitiless robots put on colorful jerseys and enjoy a relaxing round of the world’s most refined sport: GRIND!

I came up with the rules for this scenario six years ago, and it’s been a beloved (or, in some cases, utterly reviled. 😛 ) fixture of the MEAC event ever since. The rules are a bit wordy, but in practice the event is fast and very easy to play.

One fun note about this scenario: when I came up with it, I had never played the original GRIND! format, and the newer board game version hadn’t been released yet. All I knew was the simple summary of “It’s basically Warjack soccer”; from there, I came up with some basic rules and a board layout that seemed to work. Most notably, I realized pretty quickly that you needed obstacles standing between the Grinder’s spawn point and the goals, otherwise turn 1 goals became way too easy to score. Dropping a pair of columns there seemed to do the job.

So imagine my surprise when I finally saw PP’s vision of a GRIND! board a few months later and saw that they had gone through the exact same thought process and come to the exact same conclusion. XD

The special board size and layout for this scenario is something we’ve always accommodated using cloth mats that have the board drawn on it with shirt paint; it looks a bit chintzy, but we use our imaginations. 🙂 However, this year I decided to spend some time making one real copy of my Grind board that fully reflects the awesomeness of the format so that I could haul it down with me to Templecon and inflict the majesty of GRIND! upon an entirely new audience.

Here’s how that went down…

The map design was transferred to sheets of 1″ pink styrofoam, using circles that I printed from Illustrator to mark the lava pits.

Cut cut cut!

The playing surface is only 24″ by 30″, so I’m going to have this central area floating in a lava pool inside of a larger stone frame. The extra space around the edge gives me room to print the format rules straight onto the board (which isn’t complete as of this writing, but which will be there in time for Templecon).

I use carpenter’s glue to attach the outer frame to the 1/4″ MDF backing board. Carpenter’s glue is quite a bit stronger than white glue, so it works very well for board construction.

I weigh the frame pieces down with comic book boxes while they dry. In the middle, you can see where I’ve used wooden dowels to attach the two sides of the play area together, keeping them the correct distance apart.

To bridge the gap, I cut out some 4″ Foamcore pieces that curve around the lava pits.

I want the lava underneath the board to show through everywhere it can, so I scrounge up some thin aluminum mesh (I think it’s intended as an understructure for papier maché) that will be strung across the central strip for models to walk across.

I trace the desired shapes onto it with a sharpie, and then cut them out with clippers.

The green rectangle here is where the mesh will be. The white panels will be steel plates; here I’m gluing on craft foam edges to give them a bit of texture (rivets will be added toward the end).

The mesh is stuck down between the foamcore and the craft foam edges, held in by carpenter’s glue.

A similar structure will be set up in the middle, though with a totally open central mesh circle.

Here’s how it all looks when put together. It won’t all be glued in until a bit later.

First, I need to rough up the stone surface a bit. First up are stone cracks, to show the evidence of what decades of brutal violence have done to the arena. These are drawn on with a sharpie.

Then, I use a knife to cut them out. I cut in along the drawn lines at a 45″ angle on one side, then flip the knife and do the same on the other side to create a V-shaped trench. The knife is wiggled as I go to create irregular patterns.

More craft foam rims!

Here’s how it all looks glued together. Things are already shaping up nicely. 😀

In the GRIND! scenario, your caster isn’t on the board, but can exert some influence in a bubble centered on the column on your side of the field. People have come to represent this over the years by standing their caster on top of the stone pillars I built; I’ll be canonizing this practice by building a secure “eagle’s nest” at the top of each one for caster models to slot into.

I create the columns by gluing two pieces of styrofoam together, then use a knife to cut them into cylinders. Grooves (not shown here, but visible later) are then cut into the surface using a very sharp utility knife.

A very, very sharp utility knife. ;_;

More stone structures are created to act as backboards for the goals. These have no functional impact on the game, but they look cool. 😛

I want the central slab to look like it was magically cut from the surrounding rock, so I continue the cracks from the play area into the outer frame.

Alrighty, so the next bit is kind of cool. The problem I’ve always had when setting up lava terrain is that flat-colour lava never looks right. A flat-painted lava river underneath a piece of stone will shade down to black, but real lava glows with an internal light and would appear bright orange in that spot. It’s what makes lava so visually distinctive.

To solve this problem, I would be lighting my lava field with an array of hidden lights. This would be handled by a couple strings of orange Christmas lights (so, Halloween lights, I guess) that would be stuck down underneath the play area.

Christmas lights are designed not to get TOO hot, but styrofoam insulation is very vulnerable to heat, so I attached a cardboard barrier that would sit between the lights and the foam.

This noble task would be handled by my most trusted associate: Fresca.

Seriously, Fresca and tea are more or less the only liquids Spud imbibes. Water is gross. Eww.

The Fresca boxes are cut into the shape of my foam panels and then stuck down with more carpenter’s glue.

Holes are cut out in the few spots where I want the lava to shine through the play surface.

To make room for the lights, I create risers out of small stacks of foamcore; these lift the board surface up about half an inch.

In order to keep the board centered exactly where I want it, I’m going to attach these corner pylons to the bottom frame at the corners of the play surface.

With a corresponding hole cut into the field, these ensure that the surface doesn’t slide around. The higher pylons are there for visual purposes– I’ll be attaching the lower and higher pylons together with craft chain later on.

Alrighty, that’s most it for the mundane construction. Let’s light this sucker up!

Light attachment was very low-tech: I simply hot-glued the entire string to the underside of the playing field.

Each light was flattened against the surface. As you can see, the risers were spaced to give me enough room to completely hide each light a few millimeters away from the edge.

The string of lights made its way around the outer edge, jumping across the gap by way of the foamcore sections (which is mostly why they were put there– if I had made the entire center section out of mesh, you would’ve seen the light strings).

One string around the outer edge does a pretty awesome job of lighting things up, but it leaves the center a bit dark, and we can’t have that.

MOAR LIGHTS!

MOOOOOOOAAAAAAR!!!!

Ahem.

With the majority of construction complete, I used a “syringe bottle” of t-shirt paint to apply rivet dots all around the metal rims. I figured this technique out a few years ago– it is VASTLY easier than trying to punch out tiny plastic circles and glue them onto things. >_<

Paint time!

The boards were basecoated in black spray paint, which required me to first cover them in a protective layer of Mod Podge to stop the propellant in the spray cans from disintegrating the foam.

On a totally unrelated note, I noticed while I was spraying these in my store’s parking lot that an unruly band of local hooligans were wandering around spraying black paint on the ground and curb. I don’t know what those kids’ problem is, but they really need to learn to respect other people’s property.

…

Here it is with black paint applied.

Yes… YES! LET IT BURN WITH THE FIERY HEAT OF URCAEN!

Next up, I had to texture the lava. I didn’t want flat wood on the lava parts, so I added a bit of relief with spackle, using this piece of foamcore as an improvised spatula.

I spread it across the gap in the two frame panels, and then carefully cut them apart once it was dry.

The areas underneath the playing field didn’t need any spackle as they wouldn’t end up being visible.

Once the spackle was dry, I masked off the edges with painter’s tape so that I could spray the lava yellow without making too much of a mess.

Spray spray spray!

Since lava is hotter inside than on its surface, you generally paint it backwards from how normal painting works– basecoat in a very light yellow, then apply steadily darker stages of orange, red, and red-black as you get to the cooler parts on top.

I ultimately didn’t like how my lava came out on this board– I have a pretty good technique for painting thin rivers of lava, but large spreads of it are a lot more challenging, necessitating me to break the surface up into a sea of small chunks. Getting the chunks into the correct size, shape, proximity, and coloration is really complicated, and for this project I don’t think I was ultimately successful, as you’ll see over the next couple pictures.

Light orange is layered over in darker orange, then red.

The edges of the river, where the flowing lava churns against itself as it snags on the shores, are left yellow.

Red!

Then dark red!

Ehh… it’s passable, but it isn’t going to win any awards. :/

PILLARS!

The tops of the pillars have a series of slots designed to fit 30mm, 40mm, and 50mm bases. 3Lylyth and eReznik can suck it. >:(

Rivets!

Also, spackle!

CHAINS!

I’ve made a lot of black stone terrain over the years, and I’ve always textured it using ripped-apart foam paintbrushes. This time, I tried using a large painting sponge to see how the effect compared.

End result: not too bad, but it seems to apply more paint than the foam brushes, which makes the stone more grey and less black. I might give it another try at some point to see if I can fix this by wiping paint off the sponge, as the reduction in application time due to the much larger sponge really would be a boon if I can work out the kinks…

The last step was to paint the metals– basecoating in dark silver, lightly drybrushing in lighter silver, and then washing the entire mess with whatever GW’s replacement for Devlan Mud is.

And with that, the board was complete.

(And now with lights off… my camera doesn’t take very good photos in low light– it overadjusts the brightness and turns off anti-shake. >_<)

Crappy lava aside, I think it looks pretty badass. 😀

There are a few small adjustments I need to make before hauling it down to Templecon, but they should be pretty quick:

• Rules printouts around the frame, as mentioned above.
• Currently the power cord for the lights runs through the lava river. I’m going to drill a hole through the bottom of the frame to keep it out of sight.
• Velcro strips underneath the frame panels to hold them more tightly together, hopefully avoiding the visible seam you can see in that last photo.

And that’s about all I have to say about that. If you’re coming down to Rhode Island in February, come poke me and I’ll be happy to have a game of Extremely Violent Warjack Soccer with you. 🙂

-Spud