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Just as I did with my Normandy display board, I had collected so many models that I decided I needed a new place to display them and, despite my protests, my wife wouldn’t let me set them up on top of the piano in the living room. So, I decided to build a display board.

This is not a gaming board. It’s not realistic in the slightest. There are so many miniatures crammed onto this board that there’s no way that any game would run this way. I’m not depicting a specific battle, and I honestly don’t know if there was ever a battle in North Africa where the Allies would have dug in in reinforced trenches. But I wanted trenches, and I had just finished painting the German Afrika Korps and the British 8th Army (I actually painted two boxes of 8th Army–the Army that was made up of soldiers from all over the British Commonwealth.) I also was buy EVERY TANK I could get my hands on.

So: realism is not my main concern here. My main concern was to take the models I had and make them look cool.

I started out the way I always do, which it taking a big sheet of MDF board (I think this is 22″ x 42″, because that’s what fits comfortably on my desk.) I laid down all of the XPS foam, then tore it up because I didn’t like it, and then did it again. I’m happy with the turnout.

The second step was to seat the foam (which I did with a mix of Mod Podge and craft paint) and glue down grit. I followed this up with some good drybrushing of the sand.

You can see the trenches built into the foam, with the opposite side left empty of grit so that I could construct my Tunisian building. Then I got some balsa wood, stained it all into different shades of brown, and began to lay out the trench walls and floors.

Then it was just a matter of laying in all of the wood. In retrospect, I should have cut the wood into smaller strips to make it look more realistic, but this turned out pretty good. With the wooden slats down and the grit in place, it was time for a lot of spray paint.

I used a product called Apoxie to create a ton of sandbags. The Apoxie was far more expensive than clay and really wasn’t any better than what I could have gotten with clay. Still, I now had a bunch of sandbags. They needed to cure overnight, so I laid them all out here to dry.

The sand bags were immediately used to create gun emplacements for my artillery. They were surrounded by sandbags (which I painted) and then I set up camouflage netting to go over the guns.

On the other side of the board, it was time to build my Tunisian building. I based it off of multiple pictures, but it doesn’t represent any particular building or style.

This building was made almost entirely out of FoamCore, with the exception of the dome which came from the craft store’s flower-decoration center (you can find all kinds of good foam shapes in the fake flowers section.

Wanting to give it a stucco appearance, I first tried to spray the building with glue and then affixed some grit, but it didn’t work very well, so I applied Das clay to the exterior to give it texture. And then I started populating the building with models.

The flag is completely wrong–it’s a naval flag–but I didn’t want to hang a swastika.

I was very happy with the Afrika Korps side of this table, and I’m quote happy with it, so it was time to populate the 8th Army side.

The last part of this build was to add a bunch of barbed wire and tank traps in between the two armies.

And that’s about it. This display board is now sitting on top of my dresser (my wife never let me lay it out on top of the piano.)

I hope you enjoyed the process, and I hope the display board has inspired you to create something of your own. Even if you’re not building terrain for your games to play on, it can be a lot of fun to have a place to lay out your models.