Cardboard castles and foam dragons at HLGCon's Build Station
The Showboat Hotel in Atlantic City had no shortage of glitz in 2018, but the rooms that surprised people most were made of humbler materials. Tucked along a corridor on the trade-show floor, HLGCon's Build Station became a magnet for anyone with a hot-glue gun and a half-baked idea, offering endless sheets of cardboard, offcuts of upholstery foam, masking tape, snap-off blades, and bins of salvaged bottle caps and yarn. The brief was simple: build something the neighbours would still be talking about once the convention wrapped.
Australia sent a healthy contingent that year, and the Build Station felt instantly familiar to anyone raised on flat-pack furniture and weekend runs to Bunnings. Anybody who has assembled a Billy bookcase in a Carlton share house or hacked together a cubby from veggie-crate cardboard behind a Queenslander knows the muscle memory of slotting tabs and scoring folds. The station amplified that instinct, and the Australian crew turned out some of the cheekiest builds the venue had ever seen, partly because nobody down here treats a bit of gaffer tape as the end of a project, only the beginning.
How the Build Station actually ran
Volunteers from the convention's prop and theatre circles staffed the Build Station across all three days, restocking sheets of corrugated board whenever a sizable piece disappeared into someone's castle wall. Tools lived on a long communal table: snap-off blades, hot-glue rigs, acrylic paint, and rolls of closed-cell foam left over from a previous cosplay workshop. A whiteboard at the front tracked the unofficial rules, including a hard cap on weapons sharper than a butter knife. By the time the convention schedule ticked over to Sunday, more than two hundred completed pieces had walked out the door.
The vibe was closer to a suburban men's shed than a corporate activation. Builders drifted in solo, paired off with strangers, or arrived as full crews representing a particular game. A group running a pirate campaign claimed one corner and refused to share their rigging twine. Two first-time con-goers from Perth built a six-foot-tall mecha using only cereal boxes and grey paint, finishing just in time for the Sunday morning photo walk. Nobody charged a fee, and the only currency in play was the offer of an extra coffee from the café across the way.
Castle crawls and foam battlements for tabletop nights
Terrain-building was the obvious use case, and the Build Station produced more dice-friendly hills and walls than the organisers had budgeted for. Players hauled off foam hills that could be set up in a motel room for a quick dungeon run between panels. Cardboard castle gates folded flat enough to pack in a checked bag, then clicked into sturdy battlements once slotted. A few groups printed stencils of stonework and dragged them across damp paint for that cracked-masonry look, an old theatre trick picked up by prop makers in Melbourne's fringe scene.
One trickier build was a modular cliff face for a tabletop wargame demo, with foam carved into stepped ledges and flocked with static grass borrowed from a model railway vendor across the hall. The team ran three games simultaneously using the same terrain, sliding the cliff around their table to create new sightlines between sessions. Materials this cheap naturally lend themselves to that kind of experimentation, which is probably why the Build Station felt more like a lab than a craft fair by Sunday arvo.
LARP props and foam weapons worth their weight
Anyone who has run a foam weapon through a weekend LARP knows how quickly a soft sword becomes a not-soft sword, so the Build Station hosted an unofficial armoury where attendees could reinforce hilts, pad shields, or build replacement blades. Foam density mattered: too firm and the live blades bruise ribs at full extension, too soft and the tip wobbles like a wet noodle the moment you swing it. Volunteers coached newcomers through proper edge taping and how to balance a longsword around the crossguard rather than the pommel.
Because LARP safety sits on clear communication, builders were pointed toward resources on safe word systems before any foam weapon was handed off for live play. Several crafters took the safety briefing to heart and built stop-sign panels into their shields, so opponents could call a hold from across a clearing. Others wove reflective tape into gauntlets to keep night fights readable at a distance, a touch that mattered most when the sun dipped behind the Showboat's windows.
Escape rooms, detention breakouts, and immersive sets
The Build Station overlapped heavily with HLGCon's immersive activities, and a chunk of the cardboard ended up dressing escape room sets. Six builders constructed a detention-themed escape experience on the second floor, complete with cinderblock walls printed on heavy card, a leaky pipe illusion run on hidden fishing line, and lockers that opened when the right combination was cracked. It became one of the convention's signature experiences, and you can read more about the detention breakout build elsewhere on the site.
Foam came into its own in the ductwork and ventilation shafts of those rooms, where builders needed something that absorbed impact and read as metal under flashlight. Closed-cell foam covered in silver contact paper gave just enough sheen without feeling cold, and the modular foam sections meant the room could be reconfigured between sessions to stop returning players from solving puzzles on autopilot. The escape room coordinators credited the Build Station with letting them iterate on set pieces on the fly, something their shoestring budget would never have allowed otherwise.
Dioramas, miniatures, and storytelling vignettes
Away from the LARP and escape work, a quieter corner of the Build Station belonged to the diorama crowd. Builders spent hours on tiny scenes: an autumn tavern porch, a sci-fi docking bay with greebled gantries, an overgrown chapel where each stained-glass window was painted by hand on a single sheet of foam. A few were commissioned by podcasters recording live at the convention, who wanted props that could survive the lights.
What surprised most passers-by was the level of narrative woven into these miniature scenes. Builders staged them with little gestures: a fallen chair, a half-eaten meal, a banner left in tatters. Those touches lifted the dioramas well above the usual terrain cube, and a couple ended up in the convention's charity auction. One Brisbane artist earned the night's loudest applause for a tiny scene of a dragon curled around a campfire, built from cardboard, foam, and dryer lint.
Ideas worth borrowing for your next community build
If you are sketching a similar setup for a local convention, club night, or school holiday program, the Build Station's playbook is more or less ready to copy. Volunteer rosters, materials, and even the messy tabletop rules translate cleanly between a Sunday afternoon at a community hall and a weekend convention floor.
- Keep a single whiteboard at the entrance with three or four ground rules, including a safety cap on weapons and a polite ask to label anything meant for live play.
- Stock closed-cell foam offcuts alongside cardboard, and prefer hot-glue over sticky tape so seams hold up.
- Pair each new builder with one experienced volunteer for the first hour, the way stage managers and tradies do in theatre production.
- Save built-but-unfinished pieces overnight and put them back out the next morning, so a Saturday session can grow into a Sunday display.
- Run a safety brief before any LARP demonstration, covering call words, hand signals, and foam density.
- Host a low-stakes auction or photo walk on the final day so builders have a reason to push their work into the public eye.
Run the heavy carving on Saturday, leave the painting for Sunday, and let a quiet photo walk wrap things up. That rhythm alone turns a single weekend into a story the builders carry home with them.
What stayed with attendees after the convention wrapped was not any single dragon or castle, but the quiet proof that cardboard, foam, and a few sharp tools can carry a roomful of strangers from a blank table to a finished story in a weekend. Aussie gaming clubs already run something like this on Tuesday nights in church halls and RSL clubrooms, and HLGCon's Build Station is proof that scaling up that spirit rewards the people who turn up with a Stanley blade and a willingness to share offcuts. The trick is to set the table well, leave the rulebook on a whiteboard, and trust the room to do the rest. That is the part of HLGCon that lives on long after the foam scraps have been swept up and shipped off to recycling.