Laying a Foundation

Castle Tiles 3: How to cut foam board castle tiles for rooms in RPGs

This is the 3rd of a 5 part series on making castle tiles. To start at the beginning, click here.

Once you have a checklist of the tiles you need for your scenes, you look in your Big-Box-O-Tiles and see if you have any tiles that match. If you do, you are golden!

box of foam castle tiles
Big-Box-O-Tiles

If you are just starting out, you have some work to do!

Cut Out Simple Quick Floors

Eventually, we’ll trim off some of the floor to add walls where needed. But for now, we’ll just focus on the floor, so every type of tile is the same. We’ll get them cut out very quickly and worry about the next step later.

Materials

  • Foam board from dollar store (NOT from art supply store)
  • Paper
  • Spray Adhesive
  • Other standard craft supplies like scissors and utility knife

Directions

1. Let’s begin by creating a template for our floor tiles. Create a document with a grid template and a texture for your flooring. You can use this castleFloor or design your own. The file contains two pages – one with floor tiles and one with a speckled texture for the walls. Make sure your printer is adjusted to get the scale you want.
Floor pattern for castle tiles for RPGs

2. Now let’s print out a bunch of sheets on cardstock on a black and white printer. As we’ve previously ascertained, Bitzy the Bard is very cheap. She hates to waste color toner.

If you want your printouts to be more gray, use colored gray cardstock instead of plain white. I bought a ream of gray cardstock off Amazon that I use all for my castle tile printing.

Wall texture for walls for castle tiles for RPGs
3. Use a can of spray adhesive to glue the paper to the foam board. PLEASE do this OUTSIDE. Follow all of the safety instructions on the spray can. Bitzy the Bard is not responsible if you refuse to follow the warnings. 
Adhesive spray to glue design on castle floor tiles
If you are making a large room, you should trim the white edges off of the paper beforehand. Carefully line up the sheets to make one big sheet of tiles. You have a short time to work to get the paper lined up so work quickly. Smooth the paper down.
4. Now for the fun part Get out your utility knife and straight edge. Cut the tiles on your list out of the foam board. Just count the number of squares in each dimension and that’s where you cut. No measuring!

For smooth edges, make sure you change the blade in the utility knife periodically. I use a self-healing mat under the foam board, but you could use a piece of cardboard to protect your work surface. Save the scraps of foam board for making walls later.

5. Write the identifier of each tile on the back of it for reference and then move on to the next tile. Don’t worry about which tiles need walls at this point, just keep cutting out the floors until you have enough for everything on your checklist.

So now you have a whole bunch of tiles without walls and you are an expert at cutting foam board. (Did you remember to change your blade frequently?)

If you don’t have OCD like Bitzy, you could stop here. You can make rooms that are kinda like what you want.

But if you want lovely tiles with stone-look walls, read the Building a Great Big Beautiful Wall to learn how to trim the tiles and add those walls to them.

If you have any questions, ask them in the comment field below.

Quick tip: If you end up with spray adhesive on your hands, you can use baby oil or olive oil to remove it.

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