So I won a copy of Hivestorm in a raffle...
In the beginning...
…There was bare plastic and a cardboard mat.
My initial thoughts at this early stage was to just build the terrain and make it all as pretty as possible. But I soon figured that if I wanted a nice photography set, I would need to build a full, rigid board with a decent layout that gave me enough space to play with to the “front” of the set.
So, the board itself.
The plus side is that it provides a known dimension to work with.
The negative side to that is I had no material to hand that covered it in one piece. Therefore I had to cut some poster board in to two sections.
My next thought was about rigidity. If I just used the poster board the whole thing would wobble, crack and cause other problems.
How did I fix this you may ask?
I glued the f***ing poster board sections to the cardboard mat from the box!
This way, it makes the board rigid and uses a component form the box that I was fully intending on binning. That’s recycling!
I also chose a layout that the hivestorm book shows as one of the scenarios. I liked how that looked and got to work building, swearing and gluing!
The layout built, placed, measured correctly and glued down! 
So those bits of cardboard are useful for something!