Instead, I've come to love craft foam—the stuff you can pick up at craft stores like Michael's. While it's often pre-cut into horrible holiday craft kits, you can also get it in simple rectangles with a layer of wicked-strong, pre-applied adhesive. Craft foam is light (which makes it cheap to mail), cuts like butter with a sharp x-acto knife, drills easily, and comes in a thickness that is both easy and pleasant to pick up off the table. If you've ever suffered the frustration of trying to pick up thin card stock components, you know how important this can be.

But best of all, you can layer it up to just about any thickness you desire, to make cheap, crude, disposable game components. I used craft foam extensively for the pegboards in Roll Through the Ages: The Bronze Age, the treatment center in Pandemic: The Cure, the tiles Forbidden Island, the sand in Forbidden Desert, and all the vehicles in Thunderbirds.

So, hooray for craft foam! Try it out in your next prototyping project.

Build your own models! Here's the Thunderbirds vehicle kit (PDF) I created and sent to the modelers for scale. (Colors specified my vary from the final product.)