One Day Build: Jedha Gaming Mat

FFG’s announcement of Star Wars: Legion at GenCon got me pretty hyped and I immediately started working on some terrain I originally had intended to use with my West End/Grenadier miniatures. 

Since I love Rogue One and especially the Jedha set, I'm obviously looking forward to have some games in this setting. Moreover, I am quite confident that the desert moon provides plenty of opportunity for thrilling scenarios, even if we might have to wait for Saw Gerrera and his Partisans for quite a while before they hit the battlefields. Therefore, I started a 6’x3’ Jedha gaming mat right away. 

Although proper gaming boards might offer better opportunites to detail your scenery, I prefer gaming mats over regular gaming boards since they are inexpensive, much easier to store and really easy to build. Furthermore, my wife had some spare cloth lying around...

I went for a rather fancy approach and used a sewing machine to seam the edges of my mat. This is highly optional though...

After that, I took all the material needed outside and prepared for texturing. For a simple desert scenery like Jedha, you basically just need cheap (!) acrylic sealant, acrylic paints and sand.

Just mix the sealant, the sand and the colours of choice and spread them violently on the prepared piece of cloth.

At this point you are actually good to go. You could already use your mat after it's fully dry. Thanks to the acrylic sealant, the mat will stay flexible and can be rolled up for easy storage and transportation. (Note that there's a lot of loose sand on the mat in this picture. This will come off once it's dry.)

I decided to add just a little extra detail by giving it a light drybrush just to make the structure of the mat pop a little.

And this is the result after a couple of hours of work. I might still add some little extra detail (grass tufts etc.) once it's fully dried, but for now my first Star Wars: Legion gaming mat is finished and ready to go...