I bought two copies of this set during the NOVA Open from the InCountry booth and immediately set to work on it when I got home. I don’t often do MDF, but I liked the removable doors and I wanted to produce some modern-ish terrain quickly, so here I am.

My inspiration was Brazilian favelas—I liked the idea of a very colorful, beat-up area. It made for a fun, relatively small project. I added some sand and bits of broken MDF, as well as bricks from the kit to the edges of buildings and insides of the ruins to augment them. I find that with MDF you always need to put more detail on to make the kits worthwhile, so I did appreciate that this kit came with scatter, bricks, cinder blocks, and other small details like the panels you can glue onto the outside of the buildings.

To help with texturing, I used the set to test Dirty Down Rust—I liked it and generally think it’s worth the money for the effect, but I recommend varying its application for best effects. Thin and smear it in some places, lay it on heavy in others.

With the work, for $75, I got three buildings and one ruin per kit, for a total of $150. Suffice it to say I would never have done this if I hadn’t been at a convention where my room got comped. I would not buy the kit again—not due to lack of quality, but because it just isn’t a good price point to me. One set will, however, fill up a 2×2 board. I’d perhaps shop around, but if you like the look and don’t mind the price, it’s a good bit of kit for MDF. Not the best by any stretch, but also not priced like the best.

To help punctuate the shanty towns, I produced a wrecked vehicle with a $5 diecast toy. I’m unsure of its scale, but it looks good on tabletop. I find you can play with the scale of vehicles so long as they’re consistent with each other. To produce it, I lit the truck on fire to produce a believable burn effect. Then I varnished it and used Dirty Down Rust to weather. The basing I did the same way I did the desert boards the terrain is sitting on (more on that below).

Overall, not too hard.

The other thing on display here is a few 2×2 desert boards I built. I took the time to build some reasonable looking, flat desert boards. The idea is they can combine into a 4×4 for games like, say, Infinity, or they can be used as four separate boards for InCountry. The process here was nothing revolutionary: I layered spackle, followed by grout compound, followed by a PVA/Water/Sand mix onto 2×2 insulation foam tiles. It produces strong boards that don’t chip easily but may warp mildly. Plenty good for my purposes.

I look forward to using all of these for some InCountry demos later this month and I’m already most of the way through on producing generic Middle Eastern terrain for the remaining two boards—which I think will actually be better boards, despite the kits being much, MUCH cheaper.  Main issue with those is the amount of labor I had to put into upgrading them—definitely not as easy as bringing the shanty town to the board.

This will be two terrain sets down in one month. I’m very happy to be back into making terrain, and once my new printer comes in I definitely anticipate making a lot more. They won’t be for InCountry, though. I’ll likely lean more… futuristic.

Anyway, here’s some shots.