JuLandscape
Miniature Landscapes
Our scenery for playing games are all landscapes, be it a section of a Hive City in a far flung section of the Solar System, a piece of woodland in the boonies of Northumberland, UK, the sewer system under a secretive town in Vermont, USA, or the streets of a city being attacked by an alien invasion force. And I’ve had the scenery perfect for this last scenario for more than 10 years, just in various states of painting.
In July I took stock of my Mantic Games scenery for Mars Attacks, which I also use occasionally for The Walking Dead, in preparation for the XCOM miniatures game coming out from Modiphius. I had the damaged wall pieces painted a long time ago, but the complete walls, rooftops and half walls needed completed. There was also a range of scatter terrain pieces like benches, post boxes, bins, and fences, along with cool bits of connection types for the walls, like electric conduits and signs.
The full wall pieces have a brick façade on one side, and a concrete rendering on the other. All of the bricks are painted the same way, and the concrete walls I have painted in two different colours, using the same techniques in the video. On some of the walls I added graffiti to add some colour to the scenes, and I painted a range of different signs that are used as connectors for the walls. Pictured above is a Warhammer store sign, as a reference to the Mars Attacks rulebook where they cheekily added a destroyed Games Workshop sign, where you can only see what it is due to the iconic font.
The scenery really makes the game you play. Although you can plonk anything down on the table and it’s fine, playing The Walking Dead or Carnevale on a board of Warhammer 40K scenery kind of stands out as strange. Carnevale has a unique style to it, which the Streets of Venice scenery is made perfectly for, however, playing The Walking Dead with it would work fine, particularly if you want to have a game set in a city with a vibrant identity, like New Orleans, or as the scenery is made for, Venice.
However, this scenery is a nice general modern town and city style, so it will work for a lot of games. There’s the obvious Mars Attacks! where the scenery originates, The Walking Dead works well with it if you want to have a tight cityscape to play in. I’ve played games with a couple Mars Attacks mats, which are bigger than The Walking Dead mats, and they made for terrifying games where alleyways became charnel houses and streets quickly got blocked meaning you had to fight hard, and in some cases, sacrifice some characters. It also lends itself well to Fallout. Although it doesn’t match the scenery in the games, it still has that old Americana feel of the 1950s which Fallout apes and adds some technology to.
Building your Scenery makes the game, and different games have different requirements. I think what I was working on in July is possibly the best scenery for a wide range of games.