I mispoke, it wasn’t cardboard, it was plywood. Last year the LUG was supposed to cover 100 ACTUAL square feet for the train show. Even approximating a baseplate as one square foot, and baseplates costing $5 each, a double layer of baseplates to cover that area would have been over a thousand bucks! My contention is that a thousand bucks of flat landscape does not have the same visual appeal as a thousand bucks worth of buildings on top of tablecloths.