Adding walls to foam castle tiles for RPGs with Bitzy the Bard

This is the 4th of a 5 part series on making castle tiles. To start at the beginning, click here.

We have a lovely stack of tiles but no walls. One option is to use them as they are. You can use standup doors to show the doorways and tell the players to assume there are walls around the perimeter.

But if you want more of a 3D effect, you can add walls to the tiles made out of strips of foam board.

Adding Walls to the Tiles

The next step is to trim the tiles and add foam board strips to them. You will be adding texture to the wall strips to indicate a stone brick patter. It’s time to whip out your trusty glue gun and get to work!

Materials

Foam board from dollar store
Paper
Glue gun and glue sticks
Other standard craft supplies like scissors and utility knife

Directions

1. You have your stacks of labelled tiles. Now it is time to trim them where you will be adding a wall. Each foam board wall will be about 1/4″ wide, so that is what you need to trim off each tile where there will be a wall.

Foam castle floor tile showing its width is 2.5in per side

2. Take a tile out of the stack and see what kind of tile it is. Now let’s look at that chart again that shows the different types of tiles. Get your pencil ready.

Different types of castle tiles for RPGs — Different Types of Tiles

A – Plain old floor tile. You are done! Hooray! Throw it in the bin of completed tiles.
B – Side Wall. You need to trim 1/4″ off of one side where you will be adding a wall. Mark where you want to trim the tile on the back for reference.
C – Corridor. Mark two opposite sides where you will be trimming to add walls.
D – Corner. Mark two adjoining sides.
E – Closet. Mark three sides. Lots of trimming on this one.
F – Rounded Corner. Take out a circle template also known as a mug, glass, or jar of a radius close to what you need. Trace on the face of the tile where you will be cutting.
G – Angled Corner. Draw a line on the face of the tile connecting two opposite corners. 3.

Mark wall locations on foam castle tiles

3. Take out that utility knife and put in a fresh blade. Use a straight edge to trim each tile in the locations you marked. Don’t measure the whole tile! Just measure 1/4″ off the end. For the curved tiles, freehand the cut slowly or use a guide.

And for goodness sake, tell me you are still using either a self-healing mat or something else to protect your mother’s good dining room table!

4. Before you add the foam walls you need to put some studs up! Take those pieces of cardstock with the speckled pattern on them. These will serve as your studs.
Trim 3/4″ strips of wall-texture cardstock using your utility knife and straight edge.

Trim off small strip of foam to make room for castle wall

5. Use your handy-dandy, low-temp hot glue gun to add a bead of glue to the edge of the tile. Make sure it is the side you trimmed or your floor pattern will be messed up! (Bitzy had to rip off glued-on walls many times because it was glued to the wrong side.)

Quickly attach the glued edge to the paper strip. Let it cool. Trim the paper stud flush with your scissors.

6. It’s time to make the foam wall. Cut 3/4″ strips of foam board. Hopefully, you saved the scraps from when you were cutting out the tiles and can use some of them.

Now you get to see why it was so important to use cheapo dollar store foam board instead of the good stuff. You can peel the paper backing easily off of cheap foam board. There is no need to spray it with water or any of that nonsense. Just peel up a corner and rip!

Peel the paper off of just one side of the foam board strip. You will be decorating that side of the wall to act as the outside of your castle.

7.We get to be creative in this step and score some stone patterns in that foam strip. You could do many types of patterns, but the easiest is to pretend you have three stacks of stone bricks with a running bond pattern.

Lightly score two long parallel horizontal lines on the foam strip with your utility knife. They should be a third of the way from the long edges of the strip. (Do NOT cut all the way through the foam strip or you have to start over.)

8. Using your ruler as reference, lightly score vertical lines to make the sides of the bricks on the top and bottom row. I made mine about 1/2″ wide. (I just eyeball it.) For the middle row, lightly score vertical lines halfway between the marks that you put on the outer rows so the bricks look staggered.

Score horizontal lines between stone bricks

9. The foam strips are ready to be glued to the edges of the tiles now. Run a bead of hot glue on the edge of the tile and stick it onto the back paper side of the foam strip.

Let it cool and trim it flush with your scissors. Add the tile to a bin of almost complete tiles.

10. After you have a whole bunch of these tiles, sit back and admire your hard work so far. You can stop here and say “Good Enough!” But you could etch the lines you just made with a pencil point to really make the bricks pop!

11. This is the fun, relaxing part! Take the bin of nearly completed tiles out to the TV with a mechanical pencil or other similar object. Put on your favorite binge-watch show like Psych or Community.
Use the mechanical pencil with the lead retracted to etch a brick pattern in the foam along the scored line. Be gentle and just lightly glide the pencil around the edges to compress the foam. You are defining the grout lines and smoothing the corners of the bricks.

That’s it! You now have lovely brick walls on your tiles.

But they do look a little pale. If you are doing an ice palace, you are done.

Otherwise, read I See a White Wall and I Want to Paint it Gray to hear how to paint these walls to really make your hard work stand out!

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

Building a Great Big Beautiful Wall

Adding Walls to the Tiles

Materials

Directions

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