Blood on the Sands - a game of gladiatorial combat
Building the Arena - Part 1
To play Blood on the Sands you require a hex-grid board. You don’t need anything fancy, just a simple oval shape with hexes – ideally 11 hexes long by 9 hexes wide.
In saying that although, in my experience, nothing draws a crowd like nice terrain. So for the purposes of running Blood on the Sands at cons and game days I just had to go for something a little more eye catching.
I’ll go through the process I used scratch-building my arena in the next series of posts.
The finished arena in play
The first thing was to print out a hex grid on paper to use as a template. The hex sizes aren't that important for BotS, as long as your minis fit neatly within them.
I pinned down the hex template and then scored over the paper with a blunt tool. It left a pretty good impression in the foam.
With PVA I painted in the hexes individually, a little at a time. I used fairly fine grit and sand to texture. Larger stones would make the minis not sit well and because every hex is used, ideally you want the surface to be as flat as possible.
When the hexes were all textured it was time to address the arena walls and bleachers. I've played enough gladiator type games to know that playing them in a completely enclosed area is just no fun. In a game like BotS where the miniatures move around a lot it becomes a real pain in the subligaculum constantly reaching ove r the model arean walls to move your miniatures. That's why I always suggest a half arena open one one side. Here you can see I've placed the first layers of foam to bring the bleachers up to the hieght of the arena wall.
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