Category: terrain

Your Tax Dollars at Work

Looking at my so-called city board, something about it always seemed off to me.  It wasn’t until this weekend, while cruising what I think of as the Infiniti terrain-porn* sites, that I realized what it was.  The board was too rural.  The earth and grass speaks more of suburbia than...

Small Box Blues, Part Four

There’s no way around it – big multi-layer pieces of terrain just aren’t going to fit into a small box. So let’s just stick with a one level floor plan. Everybody and his uncle uses some variation of rectangular or hex-based tiles for their terrain.  But since this is...

Small Box Blues, Part Three

Last time we looked at a few ways that smart people approach the challenge of cramming as much terrain into a small space as possible.  This time let’s look at how a dumb person does it.  And by dumb person, I mean me. In addition to cramming as much...

Small Box Blues, Part Two

There are basically two ways to build wargame interiors.  You can place freestanding walls on a ground surface (aka “the maze”), or you can integrate them into the ground surface (aka “tiling”). There is a third way, a hybrid method with tiles that represent rooms and corridors.  Let’s look...

Small Box Blues, Part One

How do you cram as much gamable space as possible into as small a space as possible?  We’re going to kick 2016 off with a week-long series of posts introducing my solution to one specific kind of terrain.  Specifically, a solid set of sci-fi interiors that are attractive, provide...

A Tree Grows in Neo-Brooklyn

Four trees, actually.  Nine more pieces of scatter terrain – what the cool kids are calling street furniture these day – have been added to the table for cover. When it comes to small bits of raw material for scratch-building, the electric aisle of your local hardware store is...

Tiny Little Ruins

The Fantasy Big Box for One Hour Wargames needed a little something extra, and with the long Thanksgiving weekend, there was plenty of time to goof off at the hobby bench.  (It’s really more of a counter.)  So I slapped together a quick terrain piece to spruce up the...

15mm Sci-Fi Traffic Report

Scatter terrain.  You’d be hard pressed to ever have enough of it on your urban table.  Mine was sorely lacking in viable vehicles.  Matchbox cars are passable, but they just don’t tie together with the rest of the terrain.  There are a couple in this old shot, and you...

My New Box Set (of Terrain)

The first stage of any terrain project is planning, and for the rooftop fights and infiltrations, there won’t be any drop cloth – only the tippy-top levels of large buildings.  They may be anywhere from three to fifty stories tall.  The precise height doesn’t really matter since we’re only...

Rooftop Inspiration

Been daydreaming about a new Big Box of terrain specifically for the infiltration missions that are an expected part of Osprey’s Black Ops rules.  The top of one building – maybe two connected by multiple walkways or leapable gaps – should be plenty big enough for a stealth mission....