Badgering a Normie

As I say, I have the rules and a bunch of minis painted, more than enough for the two of us. The thing is terrain. I just don’t have a lot of fantasy terrain. Actually, that’s not true. I have quite a lot but it is all on sprue, and it mostly scatter.

In need of buildings, I started to look at both Sarissa (who carry the official line) and TTCombat (who carry cheaper kits). I took a few days to think about it and in that time Business Daddy emailed to say they had a sale on terrain. Diving in through the options I found they had a load of the Battle Systems fantasy buildings for 30% off. So for much the same as I was going to spend on unpainted MDF kits, I could get the pre-coloured card buildings instead. Sign me up!

A few days later it arrived and I figured it was best to start with the smallest kit and work up. The kits don’t come with instructions but rather you have to go to the website and watch some videos. Yes, that is as stupid as it sounds. 

I’m not bothered about being able to take most of them back down to their component pieces for storage but they are designed that you could. It would take a silly amount of time to get a table set up every time but if space is a premium, they look great for buildings you can store flat packed.

In terms of the building experience, other than the videos, it was fine. Pictorial instructions like the online ones you get for TTCombat kits would have been much better. The videos are pretty bad tbh and just get in the way of the process more than they help.

The pieces themselves come out of the cardboard sprues cleanly most of the time though some of the more delicate parts (like the bridge railings) weren’t properly punched and led to some tearing.

The clips are good and you get spares in each pack so if you wanted to play around with different layouts there is some capacity for that. I like the brown more than the grey, they just seem less noticeable to me on the end product. The clips go onto the cardboard well in the vast majority of instances with only one or two being so tight that you had to cut away some card or risk bending/snapping the part.

I didn’t make up any of the crates or barrels as I have plastic ones to use instead but they look like they’d be a bugger to put together.

I haven’t got round to running a pen over the edges yet (mostly because I didn’t have anything to hand) but I will before the next time they hit the table. I also still have another kit to put together but it is much larger and I don’t have time for it before next weekend.

All in all, a few hours of work over a couple of evenings and there’s enough buildings put together for a small B&B table. I think it should look pretty good given the time investment. Obviously there are better looking options out there but without spending a fortune or taking a lot of time to build, texture, paint and weather, these are perfect for my needs. They seem robust enough to take gaming and storage in their built form too which is nice.

Now the buildings are done, it is time to move onto some countryside accoutrements.