Tactical Terrain

Posted On March 12, 2012

Last time you saw the first of what should be several outdoor terrain tiles. These open up the field of play, but if you’re going to have an open field, you might as well just use gridded paper. The whole point of the tiles is to present a 3D play experience, and the point of that should be to enhance the game. A great way to enhance the game is to limit the players in some ways and give them choices in other ways – to force them to make decisions.

This just needs individual trees and rocks and other obstacles.
Man there’s a lot of stuff to build for this game.

That brings us to the design of this first outdoor tile. The foamcore let us carve a stream channel which forces the players into the decision making process. They can jump into the channel and fight at a disadvantage, or they can fight for one of the crossings. The danger is creating a piece like this is giving the players too few options. With one bridge crossing the game devolves into a fight for that one square; that makes things dull and repetitive.

In this case, the tile gives them three different crossings, a bridge, a narrows they can jump across, and a ford they can wade across. I may paint a nice road leading to the bridge, but that’s one more feature to have to align when more tiles are in play, so that might not happen.

That’s just enough choices.

In other news…the sewers look a lot better with black primer. They’ll be darker, but the tiles will jump out a lot better once painted.

Next stops: Drybrushing, Detailing, and KOO-ka-mung-Ah!
Probably needs some movable bridges for those trenches, too.