Making A Portable White Board

My players often need to synthesize their ideas in a common forum, and a police-procedural style whiteboard is an obvious and, judging by my experience, successful way of doing this. Players get a double bang for their buck because not only do they all get on the same page, the process of getting there is often a revelatory and enjoyable RPG experience in itself.

So, how do you make one?

You'll need one of those three panel cardboard things kids use for science projects, which you can source from any good office supply store, and a roll of self-adhesive whiteboard material which you can find on Amazon.

You'll be covering the inside of the folding board with the whiteboard material of course. There will be a seam because this stuff isn't sold in the same size as the project board and you'll need to make two passes with the self-adhesive plastic.

The trick to laying this stuff down is to cut it to length first and flatten it out in a warm room for a bit before attempting to stick it down.  The project board is slightly backfolded to make it lie flat, and the plastic applied by removing the backing a little at a time and burnishing the plastic with a wad of paper towel (dry) to work out the bubbles as you go.

On mine the plastic co-operated quite well and I was able to get the two passes to lie adjacent with no gaps or overlay, which is important. If you have to go for one or the other, I'd go for a small gap rather than overlap.

The plastic sticks very well to the board but will peel a bit. Taping the edges can help sometimes.

When you fold the board into threes, make sure the plastic goes into the hinge rather than lifting outward.

The portable board can be taped to any co-operative surface. I found that tape would not hold on the enormous window I wanted to stick it to so I used stacked pairs of these magnets wrapped in paper towels on each side of the glass to "pin" it. (I happened to have a bunch of these magnets lying around when I needed them. There may be other, better ways of sticking the board to glass temporarily but I don't know of them).

Dry- and wet-erase markers can be used to good effect on the board, which can be folded between games preserving the precious clue connections.

If this seems a little too much for your game, a smaller, ready-made folding whiteboard solution is available from Amazon. I've got two of these myself and they work very well for all sorts of whiteboard needs and they have a grid on the reverse side which is useful for gaming too.