Building a big river

While I have a set of rivers for my 28mm games, they are rather on the smallish side - the widest of them is around 3" wide. That's fine for most games, but not for a few I am planning. I'm working some games which involve assault crossings of a river using pontoon bridges and possibly barges and boats as well. In order to do that, you need a river that actually looks like something you'd want to cross in a boat instead of hop-skipping over it with one swift jump.

So, with that in mind, I set about creating this river. As my table is 6x8 feet, I decided to build the river in 2 foot sections, so I can use three of them to cross the table breadth wise and four to cover it lengthwise. As a river of this size does not tend to meander that much, especially in the small area represented on the table, I also decided on only doing straight sections. Additionally, I intend to build a second river set which is about half the width of this one, so I wanted to build a piece where the smaller river joins the bigger one. Finally, with shades of Lobau island in my mind, I wanted to build a sixth piece with a big island in the middle of the river.

Jumping straight to the end result, here's the set as it stands at the moment:



The material I used is a kind of foamboard that is normally used to form the base to put under laminate floors and as such is easily available in various DIY stores (I went to the nearest Brico for it). The specific one I used is [this one](http://p112335.typo3server.info/index.php?id=122&L=7).

Transforming them into a river is just a question of deciding on a number of measures, particularly a standard profile at the ends so they join up to any other section. My measurements for this river are: 30cm wide, with the banks three cm in on each side (so the river itself is 24cm wide) and 60 cm long. The next step is breaking out the cutter knife and hacking away:



The offcuts are turned into banks by means of diagonal cuts to create slopes and glued onto the river using simple wood glue, as are the islands in the big island section:



And that's where the project is at currently. Next step will be spackling the banks and glueing small stones along the banks in the riverbed, before painting the thing.

More pictures can be ogled at in [this photoset](http://www.flickr.com/photos/robartes/sets/72157625630457616/with/5274194568/).