Budget Battlefields: HESCO Barriers & Bastions
Hey guys, it's been a while, but I've been hard at work with my new baby! She doesn't know it yet, but she's going to be a total nerd. While I've had a bit of leave, when it's not my turn to hold, feed and jiggle her little self, I've been making some more terrain for my Infinity boards. Specifically, I wanted to make some walls and bunkers that were adequate height to block S7, but also easy to use, modular, and cheap to make, kind of the holy grail of terrain. After looking around for some inspiration, I came across the idea of making HESCO barriers, which fits perfectly in line with my Ariadna themed table!
What is HESCO?
HESCO is a company that makes easy to set up fortifications for the military, basically, they're wire cage boxes with a fabric bag inside that gets filled with whatever material is around, i.e. dirt and rocks. They're also used for flood control and other applications where you would probably use sandbags.
Supplies
To make the HESCO terrain I used:
- 1-inch wooden blocks
- Self-adhesive drywall tape
- Corrugated plasticard (1/8" spacing)
- Liquid Nails project adhesive
- Miniature sandbags (optional)
- Warsenal ladders (optional)
- Basing sand/rocks
I ended up buying the pack of 500 blocks, which is enough to make:
- 4x Short Towers (26 blocks each)
- 2x Medium Towers (38 blocks each)
- 2x Tall Towers (50 blocks each)
- 8x Walls (16 blocks each)
- 4x Firing Points (14 blocks each)
- 6x Corners (3 blocks each)
With 18 blocks left over to make some walls for cover.
Building with Blocks
All of the terrain is made up of individual HESCO blocks glued together in different combinations. To make an individual block, just wrap 4 sides of a wood cube in the drywall tape, leaving the top and bottom sides blank (you'll glue sand on the top).
To make a tower, I started by making 4x4 squares of blocks, once I reached the desired height, I put down a 4" square of the corrugated plasticard, then finished the firing platform with some more blocks, leaving one side open for access. The roof is another square of Plasticard, topped off with sandbags. The short walls in my calculation above have only 1 ring of blocks in the base, medium has two rings (shown in the picture), and tall has 3 rings.
The walls were a bit more straight forward, they have a 4x2 base, then stacked two high to make a 3" tall wall, which is just tall enough to block S7. Making the firing point is just like making the wall, except you leave off the middle two blocks in the top row of the wall, and you push out the middle two of the middle row to the edge (leaving a wide enough ledge behind it to put a model). Finally the corners are just stacks of 3 blocks, which you put between the walls when you want a 90° turn.
Voila! It actually doesn't take much time to produce and you can make nearly a full board worth of Infinity terrain for a little over $100.
Jean Louise
For those wondering, here is the little monster. She was born on the 15th and has been a bundle of joy, poop, and tears ever since... and I've already started finding the nerdy onesies, this one is coming in the mail today. If you have any more good nerd baby paraphernalia you can recommend, please share them in the comments!
