Last month I took the time to repaint, assemble, and dress up a good deal of the Warzone Arabia line of MDF buildings from Black Site Studios. If you’ve followed my Off the Bench posts, you know I mostly adore the line and feel it was justified. If you haven’t, scroll to my BLUF section right below if you want the quick notes. In fact, let’s just jump into that now:

Blunt Line Up Front (BLUF)

My personal perspective and bias is featured in the next section—I recommend reviewing it, but here’s the short version.

In total, I bought, built, and repainted the following:

· Slums & Markets Pack (Recommended)

· Abboud Trading Company (Recommended)

· The Rashid Building (Not recommended, minor caveat)

· Turhan Imports (Recommended)

· The Shihab Building (Recommended)

· The Baghdad Hotel (Not recommended, major caveats)

· Temara Safehouse (Recommended)

I repainted most of the kits to improve them, but my reasons for not recommending two of the kits is based in raw kit functionality or detail, not my experience augmenting them. For more details, see below after my section on personal bias.

The price point was right for the quality but is definitely “up there.” For MDF, I don’t usually see the cheapest kits as worthwhile in a world of 3D printing, so I don’t consider this a flaw. The price is high, so the bar for quality is also high. It’s also worth noting that with great MDF kits, painting is easier—you paint the pieces individually, then assemble. You can’t quite do that with 3D prints. This may be veering into bias, though, so let’s switch over.

My Personal Bias

I 3D print terrain like it’s going out of style, which means I rarely pick up MDF. I only do it if I really like the style of the kits or feel they deliver something I don’t normally get. I also tend to hate MDF, as assembling the kit is often annoying and laborious. It’s more fun to just print it off, paint it up, and put it down.

I picked up these kits due to raw detail and functionality. They have working doors, interior doors, interior walls, and good layering that makes them feel right. For the setting, the boxiness of the MDF works well. I played on these kits at the NOVA Open 2023, and it sold me immediately.

That said, I expect a high standard from my terrain and knew right away I’d be repainting and weathering the kits, which Black Site Studios encourages! I want to state that if you hate painting terrain and can “settle” for just good-looking terrain, the kits work well out of the box unpainted. If you have a higher standard, though, don’t be fooled by the pre-painting. It is, by and large, not up to snuff. It’s just solid colors with some shading resulting from the burns of laser cutting. It was also, as you’ll see below, somewhat inconsistent. I’ll start with generic criticisms and upgrades I made that flow throughout all the kits, then dive into the kits individually.

Generic Criticisms and Upgrades

For almost every kit I repainted the floors, painted additional colors onto the bricks, added carpets and signage, and painted details like the door windows and handles. For most kits, I repainted walls entirely and repainted the windows and other small parts entirely.

I think you could easily augment the kits by just weathering them, painting some of the bricks, and painting the details already featured. This would be less time consuming than what I did and still produce a better overall product—it’s my recommended path for most people.

As per common issues: the buildings use tabs that fit into slots to connect floors together. These tabs are a little too precise in fit and that makes it hard to seat the floors. I trimmed the tabs with my hobby knife to make them a little slimmer, which fixed this issue. Not a hard fix.

The colors of the walls were, for the most part, consistent. In one or two kits they varied a little, which I found noticeable. Obviously, repainting the walls easily fixes this, but I did not reach out to Black Site Studios about the issue. They seem extremely dedicated to making customers happy, so I have no reason to doubt they’d find a way to make it right. I just didn’t want to wait and was already repainting, so outside of one frustrating building (Baghdad Hotel) I trucked on and didn’t care.

The stairs are annoying to put together (a common theme for MDF buildings) and I highly recommend you only install half of the stairs in each set so that you have slots bases fit into, permitting you to place miniatures on the stairs. Otherwise, they slide off. The placement of the stairs within the buildings is often odd and feels unnatural, such as in The Rashid Building where the stairs have to block a window.

Finally, the doors lack interior detail. I didn’t fix this, but I do find it annoying.

Oh, and you’ll want clamps. The walls in most kits are made of two pieces: an outer and an inner wall. You glue these together… and any time you glue MDF together you want to clamp it or it’ll warp apart. You can find cheap clamps online for a dollar or less per clamp. I own six personally from a random trip to Harbor Freight where they were 60 cents.

That’s it! Into the kit specifics.

Slums and Markets Pack

This is a smaller pack that was pretty easy to put together and paint up. I only did minor touch ups, varying the brickwork and seriously weathering the worn-down areas. I also repainted the floors to a better color, but I think the kits looked good before I augmented them.

It’s worth noting this kit uses printed paper you have to glue into place to make the canopies. I do believe this produces a better look than solid wood framing, but it’s a little tricky and if you get it wrong you’ll have to seek out new canopies to print off. I think this set gives a good bit of small building scatter and helps to augment a board and make it feel more alive. Just keep in mind the brick buildings are barely big enough to contact vehicles, so they’re unlikely to be interior spaces you use for combat.

Overall, I recommend it but it may be one of the first things you drop if you’re debating a large order’s final price point.

Abboud Trading Company

This building was an easy build for MDF and a good-looking kit. Note that it’s pretty obviously a loading bay or garage. My main issue with the kit is the odd… roof? It has ruined walls on the roof which I find somewhat strange. If you leave them off, you’ll have holes to cover up on the roof, which I don’t think is too hard to do—just add rubble piles, which the kit comes with.

If you did so, you could build the rooftop walls as free standing. I recommend this and I recommend the kit overall. Just know that if you build the walls onto the roof, they prove a little odd in gameplay. They don’t provide cover for a 28mm miniature, they just provide LOS block. I find myself adding barricades so players have a reason to even use the roof.

The Rashid Building

This kit is beautiful, to be clear. It has minor problems in construction like the floor tabs mentioned previously, but overall it was good. The major issue is the balconies.

They sit loosely attached to the building, using friction fit to connect. This isn’t sufficient, and they have a bad tendency to get in the way. If you remove the floor… you basically have to remove the balconies or take them with you. After one game I found this so annoying I trimmed the legs off and glued the balconies into place, period.

This, unfortunately, hurts the look of the kit as it does feel odd to not have supports under the balcony.

Further, the placement of the internal stairs is nonsensical. They block a window. I could not solve how to modify the kit to fix this issue without cutting up the wood a bunch, which was a step too far for me. What I did was cut up some scraps and produce an interior barrier around the obvious hole in the second floor so at least it looked better.

I don’t recommend The Rashid Building, but it’s not a bad kit at all and if you really like it and are willing to make the above changes, it does the eye quite nicely.

Turhan Imports

A few things are odd about this building. For one, the exterior stairs block a window when placed correctly. Two, the stairs feature… entrances…(?) on two sides that don’t clearly lead anywhere and can’t be easily removed or covered up. Also, I think the normal coloring is odd and not very good looking. I did a ton of repainting for this kit. Oh! And the exterior crumbling wall portions… don’t cover the stairs at all, which is weird. Thankfully there’s a few extra pieces I used to have the stairs match, but they end up less covered as a result.

Otherwise, overall great building. Note that the hatch on the roof doesn’t come with a corresponding interior ladder, so you can drop in but not really climb up.

I recommend this kit and I think it’s one of the better ones in overall effect. Very usable in gameplay due to the accessible roof with (soft) cover.

The Shihab Building

An easy recommendation. I did a minimal amount of repainting and it looked good. Pay attention to the orientation of the stairs as you build it. They do carry the normal caveat of feeling a bit odd, but they’re better here than in other buildings.

Temara Safehouse

You may notice I just went out of order. We’ll save Baghdad Hotel for last—Temara Safehouse helps to explain why.

I recommend this kit. It is an absolute centerpiece for your board. It’s pricier than the other kits, but worth it in my mind. It really ties things together and is big enough to field a scenario by itself for a quick skirmish bout. This building sold me on the line.

I love the interior doors, the multiple floors, the stairs leading up from both sides. It makes for an eminently interactable building that works quite well in gameplay. Just remember to leave off every other stair so you can fit bases onto the stairs without miniatures falling over.

The quality here is on par with the remaining kits—expect to trim the bits that connect the floors. Note that the crumbling walls don’t apply to the stairs for some reason (though you can easily leave them off, as seen in my personal building). Also, the back door was annoyingly faced inward, not outward. For consistency, I drilled a small hole and reoriented the door. This isn’t killer, but it’s an odd oversight.

Again, recommended. Great kit, and a great exemplar of the set.

The Baghdad Hotel

I want to preface by saying this: for a normal MDF kit, this is generally great. For this line of MDF kits, post 2022 redesign (this IS the newest version of the kit, not the old one) it is shockingly below par. Now, some of this is buyer beware. The photos on their website show most of these issues. I didn’t pay attention at time of purchase.

Also, my kit was all kinds of funky. The colors were mismatched, the kit was stuck together on arrival, and the paint job was damaged as a result. I repainted most of the kit, but I’m confident that Black Site would have compensated me or sent me replacement parts had I reached out. They gave me literal custom made Yugioh cards with the names of the people who packed my kits, stressing the fact that they want to make their customers happy. It’s blind faith, but I trust them.

THAT SAID

I was very annoyed with this kit. It lacks the interior walls of the other kits, so I resorted to wallpapering the interior (somewhat poorly, so I went back and weathered it heavily). It lacks interior doors, so I 3D printed a solution. The color mismatches forced me to thoroughly weather the outside walls of the building. The small room on the roof has no way of connecting its own roof, so I made my own method. The elevators have no interior floors for some reason, so you can’t play out units properly moving into and out of elevators. The floor layouts don’t really make sense. I suppose you’re just renting an entire floor in the hotel, because it really doesn’t seem to be multiple suites. The signage on the roof falls over constantly and requires counter-weights to stop it from happening.

Okay, okay. Breathe. We have one more critical issue that isn’t nitpicking.

The front door straight up does not fit. I had to trim it down significantly to fit it. None of the doors would fit this space. This isn’t a flaw with my kit—this is a flaw with the design itself, and a notable one. For a “Redesign” I find this odd. I’d hate to see the original.

I’m sorry to say all of this, honestly. I wanted this kit to be my shining jewel. I left it for last to be my triumphant victory lap. I regretted this entirely and honestly wish I hadn’t dropped $80 on it.

I cannot recommend The Baghdad Hotel.

Concluding Thoughts

So there you go. Mostly recommendations, minus two buildings, with one of those being reasonable to purchase if you’re ready to mod it. As a 3D printer myself, I don’t regret the overall purchase (aside from the Hotel) and I suspect I’ll look to Black Site Studios for another purchase next Black Friday. I like a lot of what they put out, and I love the working interior doors and interior detailing. The process of repainting the kits was easy (done prior to building) and for most of the kits the quality was high. I’ll seek more photos and reviews before my next purchase—their best is remarkable and worthwhile, while their mediocre isn’t. Some buyer-beware applies here.

I hope I don’t come across too negative. I’m happy with my new table of terrain and consider it money well invested. This is a set I’ll have for years and will always impress when I take it out. I even still intend to paint furniture pieces to place into the buildings to really augment and live up to the quality of the buildings themselves. My burn here is the Baghdad Hotel, mostly, as well as a few flaws throughout.

My recommendation comes down to this: absolutely avoid the hotel, grab the rest (maybe not The Rashid Building), maybe grab some walls and other scatter. Do it on Black Friday for maximal discount. After some work, you’ll love your new terrain.