A thing a week 2021, week 25 (double sided hex tiles)

If you tuned in last week you know that at long last we're playing in person again and for this campaign we're playing fully painted. In the campaigns that came before, just about any cheap-ass, stand-in, or bodged-together terrain was fine--nothing really looked good anyway. Of particular offense was my old 8"x8" hex tiles. They're stacked cardboard with a poorly-chosen tiling ground fill overlaid with a slightly squashed hex grid. They've always been a fiddly and they slide around on the table in the most annoying way and don't really want to fit together because I wasn't super precise when I cut them. Well now, I want slightly better and while we're at it, let's make them slightly more user friendly.

These are a play off of my last set of tiles back in week 13 just on a larger scale. They're a foam-core sandwich of single ply cardboard which end up at right around a half inch tall so they match the height of most of my other tiles. Like the week 13 ones, these are also magnetized in pretty much the same way. Two sides have ferrous roofing nails and two sides have magnets. Despite putting extra effort into precision cutting, cardboard and foam core just aren't precision-friendly materials and they're all slightly off. This means that the magnets don't hold super well across all tiles but they work well enough.

I still wanted hexes since my game was built for them and I'm not confident in my ability to freehand hex patterns over 640 square inches of tiles so instead of flocking & painting like I'd originally intended, I printed out some better chosen images and pasted them to either side. I think I would have liked the flocked/actually textured tiles better but a) flock gets everywhere no matter how well I've tried to seal it and b) grit on the other side isn't friendly to my very expensive gaming table. The gluing didn't go as well as I'd hoped and the PVA buckled the paper. 

I think these worked out OK. They're much nicer than the old ones even though they're basically the same kind of thing and the magnets are a nice value add. They don't entirely work since the placement of the magnets was rough and cardboard really isn't a precision material. Having ten instead of eight means I can do a 3x3 or 2x5 setup which is nice. The textures work OK though I'm not completely happy with them but the good news is that pasting over them won't be hard when I get tired of them, so I got that goin' for me. 

2021 finished "building" counter: 4/5