Dungeon tiles and Hot glue

When I had to take a break of working on my Skull Dungeon Entrance, I decided to do an experiment with a different kind of modular dungeon tile.  I have seen dungeon tiles made out of cardboard, insulation foam, foam core or a combination of the three.

I am not talking about the ones that are made with a 3D printer or cast from a mold.



I am talking about a hybrid dungeon tile that can be used as a playable game tile or be used in a diorama.  After doing some research on size, materials and building methods, I decided to use a combination of cardboard, foam core, and insulation foam.  These materials are fairly inexpensive and readily available where I live.

I previously built a dungeon tile set out of expanded polystyrene and realized that it was not as durable as I wanted it to be and abandoned the idea of doing more with it.

Pictured to the left is a room tile, a straight corridor tile and an elbow corridor tile.  Only the rooms had walls, which were reduced in height for easy game play.






I decided on using cardboard for the base, foam core for the flooring and expanded foam for the walls.  Cardboard is good for a sturdy base and only warps if it gets wet.  Foam core is thin and very flexible for carving floor designs.  Expanded foam has a texture of stone, which makes it very suitable for dungeon walls and collapsed wall sections.

With my materials at hand my experiment commenced.  I began work with a simple four inch square tile, consisting of a cardboard base and a two ply flooring of foam core.  Two layers of foam core were used to prevent any warping of the material with a thicker construction.  I decided to use hot glue to bond everything together.  I wasn't sure if the hot glue would work well with the foam core, yet I knew it would not affect the cardboard.


I  had a bad experience with hot glue in which the glue was so hot that it melted the expanded foam on contact.

The backer paper was peeled off and I applied the hot glue to the cardboard and carefully pressed it against the first layer of foam core to ensure they were bonded well as the glue cooled.  To my surprise the foam core held up and did not melt.  The bond between the two materials was strong and my hands suffered no burns in the process.

The second layer application was a mess to deal with, since my glue stick ran out before I had enough hot glue on the surface.  All was not lost as I waited for the glue to cool and carefully peeled off the glue and started over.

The foam core was damaged minimally and I was still able to use the piece.





With the glue gun reloaded with another hot glue stick everything went well the second time around.

I used a pen to simply carve lines into the foam core flooring and simulate floor tiles.

And this is how it looked with a 28 mm figure for scale.