In August 2024, a rulebook called Boarding Actions was released for Warhammer 40,000. As an expansion for the game, Boarding Actions provides missions inside the corridors of vast space ships, which means that having terrain to build walls and doors is essential to the game. Without walls and doors, there is no Boarding Actions. The only thing that separates the Boarding Actions game mode from Warhammer 40,000 is that it takes place indoors. You can get official modular wall terrain so you can build mazes in the Boarding Actions book, or you can just use materials you may already own to represent walls in your game. Here are 5 ways to create Boarding Actions terrain.
One problem with walls is that they have to stand up. If you try to craft your own walls and doors, you have to come up with some mechanism to keep everything standing. You also need each wall to connect to other walls and doors so everything doesn't get nudged out of alignment (which is easy to do while moving 10 or 20 miniatures through tiny hallways). I've tried creating self-standing wall segments, and while it's not impossible it is difficult to get right, and to get a good game board you need at least 20 walls and as many doors.
But invert the problem of creating walls and doors, and you have the simpler problem of creating floors. Unlike walls and doors, the floor lies flat on your tabletop and requires no further support. And floors are easy to create.
To craft your own hallway, you can just cut some 8cm (3") square out of flat cardboard, and then use them as tiles on your tabletop. Where there's no floor tile, there's bulkhead.
With a little clever painting, you can style each side of your cardboard tiles to represent different kinds of floor. One side could be a space ship, and the other could be dungeon stone. Now you have double-purpose tiles.
For doors, you can cut out small tiles and set them between floor tiles. Paint one side of the door tile to represent a closed door and the other side to represent an open doorway, and flip it as required during gameplay.
For an lazy variation on cardboard floor tiles, you may already own themed cardboard tiles as part of a board game. These aren't likely to fit the mission layouts provided in the Boarding Actions book, but you can use them to create your own layouts.
Both Space Hulk and the Doom board games come with space ship tiles and door partitions designed to implement the exact same mechanic as Boarding Actions. It's less an alternative to Boarding Actions and more like DLC.
Blackstone Fortress tiles also works, although being hex-based they result in some strange layouts compared to the strict grids of Boarding Actions. There aren't any doors in Blackstone Fortress, either, you can use tokens or other crafted solutions.
You could even use the original gamemaker's kit, HeroQuest. The HeroQuest board has walls drawn on, and it's got door partitions in the box. It won't recreate layouts from the book, but it's a great game laboratory if you're keen to design your own death mazes.
Coming to wargames from roleplaying games as I did, I'm used to flat grid paper to represent battle maps. I have a few dry erase boards with grids printed on them. Add walls and doors, and you can get the exact layouts as show in the Boarding Actions book, or design your own.
I love repurposing the spare plastic frame (a "sprue") in a model kit. I've cut them into tiny bricks to build a well and a fireplace and other masonry work, and I've cut them into pipes to decorate building interiours. I've also made a wall or two out of spare sprues. I do lazy "brick" work for walls, using big segments rather than realistic bricks (small bricks would take way too long, and use too much glue), so there are big gaps in my "walls" but I pretend there aren't during gameplay. I never got around to making doors in these structures, so I just leave space between walls when setting up my board and use a token to represent a closed door (no token means an open door). It's a little fiddly, especially because sprue sizes do differ between model kits, so I don't know that I'd make 20 or 40 walls this way. However, I did build a bunch of small knee-high partitions to accentuate the walls in Blackstone Fortress and they've served me well. You could use short partitions to signify where a wall exists on your ship.
After weeks of playing Boarding Actions (these were games out of White Dwarf, even before the book was released) I finally decided that I was enough of a fan of the game mode to purchase a good set of wall and door terrain. I sincerely didn't know, at the time, that Games Workshop sold walls for Boarding Actions, because I only knew Boarding Actions as a feature in White Dwarf. I assumed you were supposed to craft your own walls, or just play on an RPG mat. Imagine my excitement when I discovered that Battle Kiwi sold MDF kits you could use to build towers and walls with doors that even opened and closed.
I love the kit and use it all the time. I'm playing through each mission in the Boarding Actions book, so I have walls and doors and towers on my gaming table more often than not, lately. The MDF kit doesn't come with as many segments as the official kit, so sometimes I have to modify the layout of a mission, but I'm otherwise completely satisfied with my MDF version. It fits nicely with all my other MDF terrain, it links together nicely to make a pretty steady board, and it looks pretty great. No complaints.
I'm having a lot of fun with Boarding Actions, and to be honest it's been a pleasant surprise to find that the formula works just as well with non-standard terrain. Sending my soldiers out onto the Doom board, and down into the dungeons of Castle Ravenloft or Wrath of Ashardalon, has proven a fun diversion from the usual way of creating a board. I think the lesson is that crafting your own solutions, or mashing game components together, can be a lot of fun and it can save you from having to invest in a lot of terrain all at once. If you've got pieces of a fun setting you think would be fun for your soldiers to explore, set it up on your tabletop and send them in!
All images in this post copyright Games Workshop.