As a wholehearted subscriber to Marc LeBlanc’s Eight Kinds of Fun theory (explained in some more detail by AngryDM here), I appreciate that for some people, props and physical things really add to the enjoyment of playing games. For tabletop RPGs, this frequently means miniatures of characters and scenery for them to adventure on. Now, there’s a lot of awesome scenery available out there, but there seems to be a bit of a divide between cast 3d scenery like Dwarven Forge (awesome, but very expensive and space-consuming to store) and flat card tiles/maps. I wanted something to give more of a 3d spatial model than a map, as well as being pleasing to work with and very cheap to produce. Given that via UCL Makespace I have free access to a laser cutter, I settled on laser-cut mountboard; 1.2mm thick and £1.90 for an A2 sheet.
The whole village here was 5 sheets of A2, plus four hours of CAD time and 45 minutes of lasering. The wall pieces were designed with tabs and slots so they’d fit snugly together, and all the roofs were removable. In theory the buildings could be dismantled and flatpacked between uses, but in practice I found that the edges of the cardboard around the tabs would start to fray and they wouldn’t fit together as easily once dismantled once. Still; cheap and quick once you’ve done the CAD, so I can see this being a library of pieces I slowly add to over time.
The Stuff That Nick Built 