Build it and they will come…

While playing 40k in Hong Kong, I was lucky enough to have an awesome FGLS down the road by the name of  Fun Atelier , who provided a number of things to enable the enjoyment of the addiction hobby while living in foreign climes. Convivial atmosphere, great staff, ice cold air conditioning, one of the few preorder facilities for GW stuff, and of course gaming space. In Hong Kong, space is at a bit of a premium, and so finding a shop in a central location (on the Island no less!) with enough room for 10 gaming tables was a bit of a luxury. What made it even better was the mass of great terrain that they had accumulated over the years, through the efforts of causal gamers and veterans alike, which enabled truly immersive games to be played and enjoyed by all (well, those of us who don’t enjoy playing on planet bowling ball that is…)

Enough terrain to sink a battleship

However, all good things must come to an end, and as my tenure in the sub-tropics approached its conclusion so did Fun Atelier’s lease of that oh so sweet central location. They moved to much bigger (and better equipped) premises, but a lot further out of the city centre, meaning games turned into an all day battle rather than just a late afternoon fracas. These things are inevitable in life, as money talks and at the end of the day and these businesses are in the business of, well, staying in business – a hard enough task at the best of times.

Somewhere, over that mountain…

So it was that I turned to the idea of hosting some games at home. Well, not quite at home as there wasn’t enough room to swing the proverbial hamster in the shoebox that was our apartment. There was however a little used table tennis room in the common areas of my block of flats that could double for a games room at a reasonable rate of rental, and my regular gaming chums were more than happy to have somewhere relatively closer to play. The only sticking point was terrain.

Not anyone’s idea of good terrain

Terrain is tricky stuff. Not only do you have to invest in making it, but you have to invest even more into making it look good. You also have to figure out how you are going to store it – something that, in Hong Kong at least, provided a real headache. There was literally no room for a box of terrain in the apartment, let alone a gaming board or tiles and a big enough table of some description. What I needed was a clever solution, something that would allow me to minimise the amount of terrain when stored but still allow for decent looking games.

The first part of this solution was easy – a games mat. I got mine from gamemat.eu . It took a few weeks to arrive, but I was delighted with it when it did – the quality was awesome, and the design meant it could be used for 40K in a number of settings as well as Bolt Action. It was also easy to store down the back of the sofa/under the bed/hung out of the window by its bag handles. Perfect.

Just awesome. Feel free to send me some more to ‘review’ in detail. I won’t charge.

Next up was the terrain. I had a vague notion of having had this problem when I was just a weeeeee bairn, and it being solved by the release of second edition. Namely, the fold up cardboard terrain that came with it. While not particularly amazing to look at (even through nostalgia tinted spectacles) it did all manage to fit back into the box at the end of the day (along with everything else) and go back on a shelf neat and tidy before the warden did her rounds at bedtime.

So good it made your teeth ache, along with the cardboard Ork dread…

And so it was that I set off in search of fold up terrain. And failed to find it. I dabbled briefly with the notion of making my own in photoshop, before stumbling across some readymade buildings on Dave Weston’s 40kaddicts website.  As you will see if you follow the link, there is a mass of building templates ready to print and made available for free on Dave’s blog, which is really great as the quality is awesome and it was exactly what I was looking for in terms of quality and laziness

So I rushed out, bought some card, downloaded all the files that I wanted and stayed behind late at work to use their fancy laser printer for free. It was only when I arrived home and started to furiously assemble the buildings that I realised that I had messed up the scales somewhere along the line. The lateral sections did not match the size of the horizontal faces for some reason. It wasn’t out by much, but by just enough to make it look weird and not stand up properly. And I had done it to all the buildings. Great.

So, with a whole bunch of printed card that couldn’t be turned into buildings, I decided to do the next best thing – bodge it! Since the lateral sections were the issue, I decided to just follow the 2nd edition terrain example and turn them into ruins. A bit of jiggery pokery with the old craft knife and a few hours later the ruins were up and ready. The fact that they were supposed to fold down flat meant that they were a bit unstable on their feet when upright, so I made some quick bases for them to slot into out of foam board, modeled to look like steps. I also painted the insides black to give them the impression of being burnt out. This is what I ended up with:

Ruins

Towers

LOS blockers

So, while not what I had originally intended, I did end up with an ok set of terrain that handily folded down into a small box (the Death Storm box to be exact). Mission accomplished, and I had no complaints from the guys who used to use it with me. Thanks again to Dave and his templates, if you are in need of terrain but modeling stuff out of polystyrene or pouring a small fortune into sector imperialis kits is not for you then I highly recommend you pop along and have a look at his STC page.

For the future, I’m not sure how much longer this set will last – three months at sea in a shipping container has not done the card stock any favours and the whole lot looks a bit droopy around the edges. I may try transfer it all onto foam board backing to make it more erect (oo-er missus) but it might just be easier to move on and make proper terrain now that space is not so much of an issue.

I also added Terrain to  The 2017/18 Hobby Season List , more in hope than expectation, but then it might just provide enough shame impetus to get me going and start making some progress through the pile of packaging I have put aside for future terrain projects – something that will delight my better half no end.

Hmmm, decisions decisions….. we will see what happens.

In the meantime, Here is the terrain in action!

Terrain in games