Terrain Thursday: Downloadable Steamroller 8″ Zones (and 2D Terrain)

This year’s Sporecon tourney was the first time we got to go full bore on Steamroller Tournies. That’s because this year I actually got around to getting us, not only the awesome Sporecon flags and objectives, but also some reusable zones.

I talk more about the zones (as well as provide you guys some links to the PDFs for your own download pleasure) under the cut.

I went with 8″ zones because they were the only size that would fit an A4 printer and Laminator. (I’ll probably be making some 6×8″ zone templates as well… eventually).

The plan was to print out zones that could be used as zones as well as 2d terrain if required. I also didn’t just want the zones to detract from any pretty terrain and models. So I went and looked for hires photos of various terrain (hills, forests, lakes, etc) for use. I get annoyed by pixellated printouts. After which, I used adobe illustrator to mask and design the zones. I added in the text because I figure that people would want to know what kind of zones they were. Plus if you don’t want to tell the players you could conceivably flip the zones over (but then it wouldn’t be as cool any more).

After that, I printed them out, and cut them…

And ran them through a laminator to make sure they could survive multiple plays. It was a lot of cutting.

The zones are a little bit smooth cos of the lamination, but I figure I’ll be using it on a flat surface anyways, so it’s not that big a deal. But if you want to increase the friction, you could always cut and past felt pads on the bottom. Up to you.

Hill
Forest
Lake
Fort

I’ve left some of the PDF templates on this blog so that fellow PGers and Steamroller organizers can download and use these PDFs. These are supposed to be 8″ PDFs but for some reason they always come out a liiiittle bit too big or too small, so you guys may have to play around with your printer magnification to get it 8″on the nose. Hope you guys put them to good use!