Prior to brainstorming the story on a whiteboard and creating our cardboard mock-up for our Blizzard’s End: Passage of the Elder Gods game, we had an initial discussion about what we wanted to have in this game, what we wanted it to be and how big it needed to be.

We divided the game into 4 worlds and a starting pad. This is also when we got the idea to have each world get higher and higher so we could have some secret rooms in the last two.

Then, we tried to estimate how big all of that would be. As a starting point, we learned about D&D scales and that a very common size used is 28mm (for an average 5’7” character).

For that, we tried to calculate the size of buildings and trees.

We wanted to make one combined diorama per world. We measured what we thought would be the final size of each world: 14” x 18”... Were we ever wrong… We also used these measurements to estimate how much XPS foam we would need to order.

To envision it on the table, before even building the cardboard much up, we made a base-size map using plain brown paper. We wanted to make sure it would fit on the table.

This is where we pick up in our first episode with the brainstorm session on our white board.

We were so green at crafting that we decided to build a half-scale model of our game using scrap material.

In the end, this whole planning was critical in the process, but we ended up changing our plans quite a bit. The size of each world ended up being double the size of our brown paper map and we even had to extend the tabletop size!

If you want to see how we brainstorm the story and build the cardboard mock-up, watch the first episode of this video series!