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Picked up some wood at the local Home Depot. The base is a 1/4" thick piece of sanded plywood with 1X2s for the under frame. I want the board to be fairly light weight as it will be sitting on a smaller table that will support it. I decided to go with a board dimension of 4' X 7'. I will put some kind of marker at the 6' line and the extra foot will give room to place models that haven't entered game play, the dead pile and room for rule books and the such. The extra foot can also be used for game play if we have a team game or want to try Apocalypse. I will post pics as I move forward.

At 1/4" thick with 1x2 frames the ends will still droop if its centered on a smaller table. You may want to consider using a set of simple saw-horses at about 24" from each end. Also I would go with the 2x2s to make the stiffeners.

Another option is a nice size dinner table from Goodwill (a typical size would be 4.5' x 3.5' without the center leaf) or someplace else really cheap. Then just drop a sheet of 3/8 to 1/2 inch ply on it.

If you are wanting it so that it can be set up and taken down, you can get stuff for legs at home depot where you can screw in legs or even make it with folding legs, like a folding table. I would definitely do some extra support even if you use the smaller table underneath it. All it would take is someone leaning in to move a figure and lose there balance and everything is on the floor.

Ok, my bad for not being very descriptive. The table the board will be sitting on is "smaller", but only by a little bit. It is a fairly heavy duty, old dining table with a dimension of 36" X 55". So there is only 6" of over-hang on the sides and about 14" on each end. The 1"X2"s are braced under the board so that they form a pocket that just fits around the outside edges of the table, locking it in position so it will not slide around the top of the table.




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Here's my first picture. The closest horizontal black line is the 6' mark from the far end. All of the black lines are string that show each of the three possible deployment maps. They will be glued to the board with PVA glue and then the board painted over in black with texture. When dry brushed the bumps where the string is under the texture and paint will show the highlight making deployment easier and faster.



I've tried several times, I can't seem to get the image to display in full size.

Very nice. I'm still a little off on using 1/4 ply...but if it works out for you, so much the better.
Neat idea with the string as long as it dosn't create too much of a bump where wobbly model syndrome gets induced.

I hope the support pieces keep the table from bending. I made a table once and PVA'd the whole thing and ended up bending it. It was weird. Didn't know PVA glue could do that until then. Then again, we were using MDF instead of plywood, so maybe that's different...