Quick n' Dirty D&D Plotting Board

My husband began his illustrious career as a D&D DM when he was 12 or 13 years old. It's been a long time coming, but with our three kids now ranging from 9 to 13 years old, we've finally begun our first official campaign. (Our goal? Make Korin Great Again!) 

While he's printed us tons of maps and occasionally pressed our school whiteboard into service, he agreed it would be nice to have a table-top mat or board for diagramming engagements. 

It's quite possible to purchase such a thing, but it seemed within the spirit of the game to construct my own instead. Here's what I came up with. 

Supplies

• Folding board from a disused boardgame  
• Printed graph paper with 1 cm to 1 in squares depending on your preferences, enough to cover board
• Contact Paper
• Scissors and/or paper cutter
• Glue stick

 

Procedure

1. Find a board game you can sacrifice. We had a Scrabble game sitting around that I purchased for its tiles, so that's what I used. Search your game collection for an old Candyland set, or head over to your local Goodwill. 
   Note: You Can do this project with a game you still want to play if - like me - you build your playing surface on the back of the gameboard. You sacrifice a small margin on the fold(s) if you go this route. 
2. Download yourself some graph paper, like this 1 cm square page from Speedytemplate. Print out enough copies to cover your board
3. Carefully trim your graph paper to fit. (Consider overlapping at the seam, which I didn't do and wish I had.) Leave 1/2 cm or so margin on all sides so there's more surface for the Contact paper to adhere.  
4. Glue your graph paper to the game board, being sure to avoid the center fold if you are using the back of the board
5. Carefully trim your Contact paper to fit the board. Apply even more carefully, starting at one long end and gently pulling the backing paper off a little at a time while you are sticking it down. 

That's all there is to it. You now have a playing grid you can diagram your campaigns upon using dry erase markers. 
I plan to create small, simple "meeples" from polymer clay for each player and major NPC. I will either use paper tokens or create a handful of very generic tokens for the bad guys. Of course, structures and significant geographical figures can be drawn in with dry erase pens.  

One last tip: If you can, erase thoroughly after each use. The Contact paper is a decent, but not perfect, dry erase surface. 
Straight rubbing alcohol does a pretty good job of cleaning the board too.