Like everyone I have been home a little more than usual (but not too much more, given I am this side of a shut-in) and I have been wondering why I have not been gaming as much as I think I would like. The more I thought about it the more I realized that when it comes to gaming, I have been a little too neglectful with the other hobby[1]: terrain making.
For example, I have a lot of Warhammer 40,000 miniatures and have almost zero terrain for it, other than a few generic trees and hills. But that is about it. Most of my terrain is for 15mm figures, and more oriented towards WW II. (The roads, for example, have tank tread marks, so are generally unsuitable for earlier periods unless you just overlook it.) Second is cartoony wooden terrain for my homemade 42mm wooden soldiers.
Sometimes I feel like I should either get out of a lot of scales and periods, or get busy with making terrain. (I actually should do both, but let's not go there...)
The FLGS (Isle of Games in Tucson, Arizona) was having a 25% off Christmas sale (30% for "Big Kahunas" like me[2]) so I decided to head the 75 miles there and see what I could get in the way of terrain.
I saw the Battle Systems tabletop terrain sets on the shelf before, but I rarely gave it more than a glance. There was an open box once and it was printed cardboard, not plastic or MDF. It looked to be pretty flimsy cardboard at that. So I always passed it by.
Well yesterday I did not pass it by. One thing I noticed that I had not before was that the box included a neoprene mat that acted as the board. I recently wrote to Alpha Terrain about their MDF products and they showed a setup on a mat and with bases that looked like floors and sidewalks that the buildings and walls were on. It turned out that all of that was for show and was not included in their set, nor could you apparently buy it. The Battle System kit appeared to be showing exactly what was in the box. I decided to give it a try. In fact I bought not only the Cyberpunk Core Set shown above, I bought the City Block Core Set and the Frontier Core Set.
As the Cyberpunk Core Set was the smallest, and I was looking to play a scenario of Hardwired and maybe one of Chrome Hammer (the author of the latter is local), I decided to put that together first. Although this set makes a 2' by 2' table – a little small for 28mm figures – it is actually pretty adequate because the walls and such break up lines of sight really well, so this promises to be setup good for a close quarters battle scenario.
The first thing I want to point out is that this is my setup, not promotional pictures from the website. Second, this is most, but not all, of what is included. There were some additional signage and gizmos that I was not really able to figure out how to incorporate (yet). More on that later.
As you can see in the image above it has a nice number of walls and furniture. You are provided with extra straight, corner, t- and four-way intersection clips to connect the walls, so you are not limited to the setup shown on the back of the box. Further, Battle Systems sells additional walls and gubbins from this set so you can definitely expand beyond what you see. They even sell the mat.
The detail of the printing is pretty good. Note the one thing I did was go around all of the edges and blacken them with a permanent marker. When I looked closer at the images on the box and the website I noticed that they painted them, using appropriate colors (red, for the neon sign, for example, and steel for the wall tops and edges). I may go back and do that.
Here is a scene where my Tau have a Dark Eldar cornered. All in all it looks pretty good.
As I was assembling everything I started to wonder if these were a little too ... small. As you can see with my GW figures below they are actually scaled pretty well with them. The crate is about 1/2 body height, even with the thick bases. They would probably look a bit small for Space Marines, but hey ... Space Marines.
They would look really well with the Star Wars figures from Imperial Assault. (I am not so sure about with the figures from Star Wars: Legion, which I also bought into.)
In case you didn't notice, there is a square grid printed on the mat. They are 1" squares, so if you play games where not knowing the range is a thing... Me, I don't play those sorts of games. I love the grid and before I noticed it, I was considering putting dots on the mat to demark the grid. So one less thing to do.
So, is it all pie in the sky? There are some minor issues, like a little bit of warping and wondering whether there will be wear and tear as I keep setting it up and tearing it down. But let me tell you, the ability to quickly get a board together like this was certainly worth the cost (about $75 for this set and $110 each for the other two sets). Again, Battle Systems has additional sets and individual parts so assuming that this holds up to my gaming, I can see getting more and gaming this genre more. So far I am impressed.
Footnotes
[1] One of the other things I have come to realize is that "gaming" is generally not a single hobby for most people. There is the miniature collecting hobby, the miniature painting hobby, the terrain making hobby, and the gaming hobby. I think the only people that get away with "just" gaming are those that show up for games at the hobby shop or your home, use your miniatures, and generally never know the rules.
[2] I get that "Kahuna" and "Big Kahuna" are rankings that speak to the "Isle" theme, but I think the real definition is "a wise man", which isn't really accurate, given they add the label for big spenders. I think they use it instead of another island-themed term: whale.
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