At the NOVA Open a few months ago I had the opportunity to play InCountry on some truly lovely boards. The buildings were so great, they made it easy to look past flaws in the event and game system. I had a great time and applaud the event runners, but one thing really stuck with me: man, those buildings were awesome.

For Black Friday I bought almost every building in the set.

They’re pre-painted, to a degree, and look great if you just build them. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t quite like their clean look when I got down to it, so I decided I needed to upgrade the buildings.

I went about thinking of small things I could do to upgrade each part that needed it. For brickwork, I picked similar colors to the base color and painted those on before applying a heavy layer of weathering.

For inner walls, I painted the obvious stripes at the top and bottom of the walls.

For floors, it varied. Some floors were fine with some weathering, others really called for me to paint the tiles.

For some buildings, I fully repainted railings, windows, or doors to shift them to a better contrasting color with their outer walls. The blue and white railings seen in one building on this post are an example of this.

For weathering, I kept it simple. I painted brickwork until the paint ran dry on my brush, and then I would paint a few more bricks–poorly. I found the inconsistency benefited the brick wall feel. I would also stipple the colors as my brush ran dry. I would further stipple leather brown sporadically and wrap up by shading black via airbrush. I focused the black at the bottoms of buildings and under windows, but I’d also use it randomly to discolor various areas both inside and out of the buildings.

Blacksite offers a free sheet of printable rugs and signage, so I took full advantage of them! Adding a bit of carpet or worn out signage truly adds a lot to a piece.

Between the repainting, weathering, and adding of signage, I spent between 3-5 hours on each building thus far. I’ve gotten most of the range done, with just two more to go. You’ll also see in a few photos I had the opportunity to play with a few of the buildings. I’m now three competitive and one solo game deep into Asymmetric Warfare and I’ll have some thoughts up on scenario design for it soon, alongside my play aides.

My review thus far is quite positive, but I’ll post a proper review for this range of terrain. I have some thoughts on individual buildings (you can skip the blue one) and some common themes to explore. For now, I just wanted to show them off, so let’s do just that: