Custom Terrain Tiles For Memoir '44 - Snowy Hills

Memoir '44 is one of my favourite games and over the years I've bought most of the expansions for it. One great expansion is Memoir '44 - Eastern Front. In this expansion you get to fight Soviet versus German battles and some Soviet versus Finnish battles. Half of these battles were fought during winter. I knew that if I was going to fight battles that were fought in winter I needed the Winter/Desert Board Map which had a snow-covered battlefield map board.

Looking at the scenarios in the Eastern Front expansion I noticed Scenario 41 - [Stalingrad] Red Barricades Factory Complex - October 22, 1942. The thing that immediately jumped out at me were a line of lush green hill hexes along the top of the map. The rest of the board was snow-covered with snow-covered factories and ruins. Huh? Why hadn't Days of Wonder produced some snow-covered hills for this expansion?

The Eastern Front expansion did come with snow-covered city ruins, snow-covered trenches, snow-covered villages, snow-covered forests, snow-covered ravines, snow-covered marshes, snow-covered factory complexes, snow-covered forested hills and snow-covered hills with villages. Unfortunately, there were no plain snow-covered hills. As a result of this players had to use their green hills from the master set which were really meant to represent summer green hills from western Europe. These green hills on a winter map board look just plain odd.

The lush green hills of Stalingrad!?!

So I decided to do something about it. At first I thought about attempting to create my own snow-covered hill tiles. Then I had the bright idea to check if anyone else had already done it. A quick search on the Internet revealed someone already had - someone by the name of DirkGent had created sheets of custom terrain tiles, one of which was entirely of snowy hills.

I downloaded the tiles and printed them out on to a sheet of A4 paper. Next, I glued this sheet on to an old game board I'd picked up at a garage sale. After the glue had dried I carefully cut around the hexes with a craft knife. Voila! - Instant snowy hills.

The finished product after gluing and cutting

So I re-set up the game board exactly as the first photo above but instead of the green hills from the original game I replaced them with my custom snowy hills.

Much better!

In writing this entry I wanted to provide a link to DirkGent's site where he had many more custom terrain tiles for Memoir '44. Unfortunately, his site is no longer available. If you are looking for snowy hills there is a single snowy hill in the files section of the Memoir '44 - Eastern Front page at BoardGameGeek.