Partway through my first Infinity table, I went on vacation. Talk about a great way to kill a project. I came back with zero motivation for cyberpunk terrain and decided to shelve the project for now—I’m not happy to do so but I have been a lot more productive as a result.

With my Blacksite Studios terrain coming in this week, I decided to continue chipping away at modern scatter terrain. Earlier this year I picked up a box of Terrain Crate: Street Scatter. I had been looking for affordable cars in the appropriate scale for my modern games, only to find that they’re much more expensive than I’d like. For $30 (discounted) this kit gives you two cars and two pickup trucks with some minor collision damage alongside small scatter and a few barricades. It’s not “Cheap” per se but rather a good price.

I’m happy with the kit and if the price doesn’t offend, I can recommend it. Pay attention for some mold lines and have fun. As the vehicles are damaged, it was easy to hide blemishes with dirt.

Next up was an experiment. I wanted a Cougar MRAP for Asymmetric Warfare but found that the few kits I could find online were $30-40, which is just more than I want to spend for a small side project. I gave 3D printing a try with my PLA printer (plastic—usually used for terrain, not miniatures) a try. I must admit some parts could have been better supported (my fault). The final piece looks more than good enough for tabletop, though, and I feel encouraged as a result.

I was struggling to find MH-6 Little Birds at 15mm scale, but I’ve realized I can just print them. Imperfections aside, they’ll work perfectly fine for the few Mogadishu games I intend to play. I even printed one in 28mm, which isn’t featured in this round of Off the Bench as I haven’t painted it yet.

You’ll note a clear WW2 vehicle—once again, an experiment. At this point I’m confident I can 3D print vehicles for terrain in PLA without too many problems. My Bambu P1P has proven to be a truly worthwhile investment.

Wrapping this up is a bunch of walls I also 3D printed. They are from Patrick Miniatures and they’re exactly what I needed for my Middle East boards. As you see in the photo at the top of this post, they allow me to take a single building and extend it into most of a 3×3 board. This really does a great job of highlighting how important scatter is. With a 3D printer, you could buy one or two MDF buildings and still end up with a very full, playable 3×3 board full of high-quality terrain.

Altogether, these will look fantastic next to the Blacksite terrain and hopefully my next post will be the culmination of a lot of work to produce a truly great modern board. The only thing I’m debating is furniture for the interiors—or really, I’m debating whether I do it before or after I work on my Fallschirmjager platoon for Chain of Command. I have an event later this month and I’d like to debut both the platoon and the board simultaneously if I can manage it. It’ll come down to time, I suppose.

Either way, it feels good to be back into production. I’ll probably lament my decision to put off the cyberpunk board, but I can’t help feeling satisfied with making progress again.

Passion is a fickle thing. I may as well use it while it’s there.