How large a city terrain set-up is the right size for you?

[Rhoderic]

Right now I'm feeling a bit of angst as my projects are once again multiplying and projections for how much terrain I'll still "need" to get are rather overwhelming. This is especially the case for city terrain.

In 28mm, I've long intended to get both a sci-fi urban board and a fantasy, swords-and-sorcery-styled urban board (in a sort of ancient / middle eastern style) at some point, but now I'm also seriously thinking about a VSF urban board, and I'm not exactly immune to pangs of desire for other varieties of city board either (modern, Tolkienesque fantasy, feudal Japan, etc).

Obviously, one way to make all of this more manageable is to make the boards quite small (keeping in mind I'd really only use city terrain for small-scope skirmish/adventure gaming). But how small? This can greatly depend on the ruleset, of course, but I like to keep my options open to use any ruleset that catches my fancy at any given time. For instance, I used to be really into the Rattrap Productions games back when they were popular, and it was standard for scenarios in said games to require boards no larger than 2 x 2 feet. I don't use the Rattrap rulesets anymore, and most other rulesets recommend larger boards (2 x 3, 3 x 3, 3 x 4 or 4 x 4).

I'm pretty sure I couldn't ever go bigger than 4 x 4 feet, but even that's quite big, and the thought of constructing/buying, storing and transporting enough city terrain to fill one 4 x 4 sci-fi board, one 4 x 4 swords-and-sorcery board, one 4 x 4 VSF board and so on is well within the realm of what I find daunting.

I expect this is a common problem with miniature gamers, so I to ask you, my fellow LAFers: Where do you land in the question of what's the right size for a city board to acceptably accommodate skirmish/adventure gaming* but not be overly impractical to acquire, store and transport? What's the middle ground for you? Of course, we all have different budgets as well as differing provisions for storage and transport, and we're not all building/buying terrain for quite the same purpose (some LAFers do very ambitious terrain set-ups for the UK show circuit, BLAMs and the like, others of us have more modest "domestic" goals). But I'm curious to know where I'm positioned in the spectrum.

Where I'm concerned, I'm thinking of having enough city terrain to fill a 3 x 3 foot board for each genre/setting. Is that smaller than what some of you other LAFers would consider acceptable for your own hobby collections? Please do be brutally honest.

* I'm talking about the kind of gaming typified by rulesets like Frostgrave, Infinity, Pulp Alley, In Her Majesty's Name, Ronin, Song of Blades and Heroes, A Fistful of Kung Fu, Strange Aeons, 7TV / 7th Voyage, Malifaux, etc.

[Cory]

For myself I prefer at least a 4x6 board for most skirmish games, though for Infinity we use the standard 4x4' board.

Much depends on the game - on an urban board if interiors are not accessible I prefer the larger, but if there is a lot of interior space with small rooms and limited lines of fire 3x3' is fine.

Building size is also important, if the buildings seem too compressed the game can take on an artificial feel.

[Rhoderic]

I like to believe in the credo that, for the purposes of a good skirmish game, there is an inverse relationship between the required size of the gaming area and the required "crowdedness" and "multi-levelness" of terrain. Thus, if the "same" skirmish scenario (in terms of figures, points costs, game length, mission objectives, etc) was to be played once on an urban table and once on a table representing not-particularly-dense wilderness (scrubland or moderately hilly moorland, say), then one can get away with having the urban table be smaller than the wilderness table, within the bounds of reason.

Also, I should have made known that I don't like the idea of interiors of buildings being off-limits at all, unless their roofs have collapsed or something. If there's a building on the table, it's quite important to me that figures should be able to enter and move around inside it. I agree if that if buildings are to be treated only as impassable blocks of solid masonry, then a larger table tends to be needed. Accessible interiors means more playing area, especially in buildings of multiple stories (but even most single-story buildings are essentially "multi-level" if figures can move on the roofs). And of course, more terrain means more maneuvering as lines of sight are blocked and "difficult ground" (which can include building interiors cluttered with furniture and other stuff) needs negotiating.

My new philosophy in regard to accessible interiors is to model those interiors as separate pieces, rather than go with the lift-off roofs approach. It means having more scenery to store and transport (and that affects my limits as to how expansive an urban table I'm prepared to model), but it also spares me some of the headaches and pitfalls of lift-off roofs. I'm not exactly new to scratchbuilding urban terrain, but I've discarded most of the buildings I've made (or at least half-finished) in the past because the lift-off roofs have ended up looking wobbly and ill-fitting. With separate interiors I'm also more free to purchase any ready-made single-piece buildings I want and then model my own interiors for them.

Building size is also important, if the buildings seem too compressed the game can take on an artificial feel.

I agree completely!

Another thing that can make the game feel overly artificial to me is if all the buildings fit inside the playing area "neatly", with open space at every edge. I like the idea of modelling parts of very large buildings "sticking in" from outside the table edges.

[Constable Bertrand]

If you do the buildings along the edge of the board, they could be open backed like dolls houses, then only the ones in the middle (perhaps go fewer floors?) need separate removable interiors.

Sounds like a 4-5 storey board, with bridges/zip lines you could easily have ample space on a 3x3, perhaps even 3x2.

I'd investigate building a multi genre board. Have a look what Mason does to achieve VSF/Pulp and Western/Inquisimunda.

Perhaps an adobe metropolis would suit an 'advanced' middle-ages, and cover sci fi. Change up the scatter terrain from crates to parts and voila!

Cheers
Matt

[Rhoderic]

Sounds like a 4-5 storey board, with bridges/zip lines you could easily have ample space on a 3x3, perhaps even 3x2.

Now you mention it, I've actually noticed that many rulesets seem to make buildings as high as 4-5 stories impractical. Admittedly I've never (to my recollection) played on a board with buildings that high, and it varies greatly from ruleset to ruleset of course, but in many of them, it takes quite a long time to climb ladders and stairs.

In a way, I think this, too, illustrates what I mean when I say that a perfectly good skirmish game can (IMHO) be had from a smaller-than-usual board as long as it's an urban-style board that's reasonably crowded with buildings (even when those buildings are not very many stories high). There's a lot more stuff that models not only get to do, but sometimes have to do: Climb ladders/stairs, open doors, climb through windows, make dangerous jumps between rooftops, and so on. These things can slow models down and make a small area "count for more". On a typical wilderness/"outdoorsy" board, there's usually not much else to be doing except running/walking, shooting, getting shot at and fighting in close combat. So a larger board makes sense there, especially so as to make the running/walking bit more tactically rewarding.

I'd investigate building a multi genre board. Have a look what Mason does to achieve VSF/Pulp and Western/Inquisimunda.

Perhaps an adobe metropolis would suit an 'advanced' middle-ages, and cover sci fi. Change up the scatter terrain from crates to parts and voila!

I do have some thoughts along these lines, and I'm very interested in Mason's project to make "transforming" terrain.

For my part, specifically, I've been thinking that if I do get into 28mm VSF, the games would mainly be set on colonial Mars. The cities there could be a mix of Victorian architecture (especially warehouses and other functionalistic structures like that) and rustic native houses. The native houses could be the same as for my swords-and-sorcery city, and I could possibly (but not with certainty) use the Victorian buildings for a modern-day urban board if I ever go in that direction.

But it hadn't struck me to take that idea as far as also having the swords-and-sorcery / VSF Martian buildings serve as "techno-archaic" structures for sci-fi (a la Tattooine, Dune or Logan's World from Rogue Trader) with some carefully chosen sci-fi bits stuck to the outsides. Thanks for that!

[Silent Invader]

I used the open back houses that Matt mentions on my SSS board.



It's not a multi genre board but is an example of an urban board that has multi height levels and open spaces .... It being a street it's long and thin rather than square.









That's some awful photos with the light as it is but there are much better in-game ones here (I'm on my phone and I don't seem to be able to get at the links to post the images direct):

http://sss.miniaturemojo.co.uk/index_games.htm

More recently - and without the snow - I used made a wrecked city board that doesn't have open-backed buildings as all of them are wrecked and therefore already accessible. This is for my Tommy & Fritz WW1 game, which presently has only the edge of town but it'd easily be enlarged:











Lots more images here:

http://www.silentinvader.uk/index_w_taf_index_terrain.html

Some time back I also made a board for my then Aliens game. As it happens I'm presently reworking this board with a view to making it more raw and with multi-levels:









More here:

http://leadadventureforum.com/index.php?topic=25459.315

http://leadadventureforum.com/index.php?topic=37419.0

I suppose what I'm getting at is that I tend to make boards of a shape and style to suit the game. I realise that this is at odds with your multi use objective, which is what I originally tried to achieve for myself. Over time my approach has drifted from multi-use with a plain table and  loose buildings, to a plain table with mini-diorama buildings, to fully detailed fixed tiles, and now as I start projects or return to old ones, everything goes onto 30cm sq tiles.

This might sound like a storage and transport nightmare but it's not so bad (with a big cupboard and a car!). I use a cardboard box with lid from IKEA that just takes a 30cm sq tile - being cardboard it's easily cut down from 30cm odd tall to the required height.

I doubt that any of this will help with your deliberations. That said, there is some multi use possibility to the terrain, but mostly with common (ie, snow, grass etc) landscape tiles but buildings are far more generic specific, albeit usually in one direction (ie, I can use Medieval building tiles for Modern but not Modern for Medieval).

Apologies for much statement of the bleeding obvious: I originally wrote a much better post but lost it when the page crashed!

EDIT: with the crash, I forgot to say that boards range from 5x2 (SSS) to 3x3 (Aliens) but are made so that they can be laid out in a big variation of arrays (rivers and railways, less so roads as they can have dead ends) tending to be the limiting factors.

[Rhoderic]

In regard to the "base board", I'm a fan of 1' tiles too. So far I haven't made any with integral terrain features. I might make some for rivers and wetlands in the future, but they won't be for combining with city terrain. Anyway, I, too, like the idea of being able to reconfigure my city as a 2' x 4' or even 2' x 5' affair for certain scenarios.

I forgot to say that boards range from 5x2 (SSS) to 3x3 (Aliens)

That's interesting, because they look bigger.

Cool terrain set-ups, by the way. I've seen the first one before, but I have more to glean from it this time around.

[Silent Invader]

Thanks

This quote from the "why 6x4" thread pretty much sums up why I like the versatility of 1x1 tiles.  My revisit of the Aliens board is scaling each tile back from 18" sq to 12" sq as the 18" limits the range of alternative layouts.

I prefer for boards to fit the scenario rather than the scenario to fit the boards. It can also save on a lot of unnecessary terrain. I'm putting together a Medieval / Fantasy board at the mo, it'll have 12 tiles and be playable as a 2x2, 3x2, 3x3, 4x3, 4x4, 5x2, 6x2. Long thin boards for 'chase' and/or ambush games can be quite tense with the lack of width forcing players to focus on the scenario and not get distracted by wandering into wider spaces.

[black hat miniatures]

I recently bought the Deepcut Studios 4 x 4 cobblestone mat as a base for my Cork City as it provides a good size for skirmish games AND limits the number of buildings I will feel I have to make/paint...

Mike