Building a Better City - Terrain Time!

Last week I had the opportunity to go to the Phoenix Lakeland Wargames Exhibition, which was the first wargames show in Cumbria. Along with a wander around, I took a load of photos, which can be found (hopefully) here on our Facebook page.

One thing that stood out for me was the quality of the boards on display for both the display games and the tournament boards for Batman. Pretty much as soon as I got home from the show, I started building some of my pile of MDF that I've acquired over the last few months. In just under a week, I've gone from nothing, to this.

The Guild Ball mat is a stand in until my cobbled mat arrives from Kraken Wargames' Kickstarter, which should be soon as they've been dispatched from the packer in Germany sometime in the last couple of days.

There GB mat was chosen for setting things out as its the same size as a Batman board, or as close to it as I have - 3' by 3', while BMG typically plays on 90cm by 90cm.

As you can see, it's a little bare still, but I do still have another small building and two larger ones that would probably dominate the board still to build. For now though, lets have a look at what I've actually spent this week's painting time on.

First up is something that doesn't belong in Gotham, but was something I just had to have when I saw it - a Star Gate from Dark Ops. It'll likely sit in the corner of a board, but it could be used as an objective for a game - one of Joker's mad cap designs perhaps.

Next is a Dino Gas station, which is from TT Combat. This one is the largest kit I've built so far, but probably the easiest to prep and build. The roof lifts off, as does the forecourt. On top of it is one of two Knight Models billboard signs, this one advertising the Vicky Vale show.

Also in the billboard set comes advertising for the Iceberg Lounge.

The remaining pieces are from the KM Container set and the KM Construction 1 set. Unfortunately half the construction set wasn't fully cut through with the laser (the same with their SWAT van, which was next on my build list) but Knight are replacing the first one and I need to email them about the latter once I've written this!

It's been really fun to see everything come together relatively quickly and lots of progress get made in the time I'd probably assign to half a miniature worth of paint job.

During these builds, particularly the Knight Models stuff which wasn't fantasically easy to remove from the frames on even the fully lasered stuff, I found myself falling in love with my chisel blade for my X-Acto, which hadn't previously had an outing.

I've also made use of something I picked up from a forthcoming Q&A answer that we got back - emery boards. This one is looking a bit tatty and broken, but it's been the tool I've used to do all the shaving down and smoothing off of all of the pieces that have gone into the builds above. Not bad for one part of a 22 item pack that cost 89p!

A final handy hint - when using PVA glue for gluing buildings, use a kids glue spreader - I picked up 10 for £1.55 from Amazon - the clean edge on the spreader really helps with keeping the joins clean. Also, instead of putting PVA down on a palette, grab an old blister pack and use that. Once it dries, you can just peel it off and start from fresh again :)