Another Terrain unboxing/review today! This time it’s the Battlefield in a Box “Ruined Buildings” set. This is the first one of a number of European building sets I picked up (don’t worry, there’s more desert stuff to come) as once I finish the Desert armies I’m working on, I’ll be doing some stuff for the European theatre. Once again, it very much follows the same format as the others, and even includes some copypasted text (including this sentence!), since the point is really to give people a good solid look at what you get in the boxes as there’s not a lot out there aside from the glamour shots on the box and GF9 website when you’re looking around to see what you get and how it all looks.
As seems to be usual, there’s a cardboard reinforcement around the inside of the box with the actual terrain pieces taped inside some bubble wrap. They’re packed in pretty tight, so there was no real worry about them arriving smashed or anything like that.
Here are the bubble-wrapped contents of the box, spaced out….
…aaaand unwrapped. We have one two roof sections, two ruined buildings, and one hollowed-out double-storey(+) building for a total of five pieces. You can also see the interior of the smaller buildings.
“Assembled” or, well, put together. You can see that the house rooftops are not interchangable between the two of them. Still, unique sculpts isn’t a bad thing by any means.
And here’s the reverse sides of the three. The GF9 pre-paint team have manged to pick out some of the bricks, and especially the wooden beams from the debris on the three models.
Here they are filled out with infantry stands so you can see exactly what fits inside with some armour to show scale.
And finally, in a mock gameplay setup style. As you can see here, they look pretty good “in action” (and even in simulated action like this). The large building is warped slightly, but not so much as to be noticable on the table – but it isn’t perfectly flat. A result of the particular resin casting used on this sculpt.
The paint is pretty solid really. It’s certainly basic, but all of the pieces have been given base coats and drybrushing applied in three colours, plus details like windows picked out in black and white. As far as pre-painted terrain, I think these are good quality and something I’d be quite happy to take out of the box and plonk down on a table to play with – which is the whole point of this line.
Of course, with a small amount of effort these could be made to look a lot better, but as with the other sets I’ve reviewed, the nice thing is doing so isn’t at all needed to get them onto the table for a decent – or better than decent – looking game. I have already picked up a second set of these – actually this set in the pics as I forgot to do the whole unboxing photo thing with the first set ‘cos I really wanted a good look at them when they arrived. With two sets, it will also give me a lot more table coverage of ruined buildings, especially when combines with other terrain pieces and roads, etc.
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The painting quality on those looks a step up from the previous ones. Makes them a very nice set of ruins!
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Yeah, the adobe-ish desert dwellings are much simpler, both in terms of the models and the real thing so it’s no surprise that the European buildings have more colour and details and in turn look a lot more visually interesting. 🙂
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These really are very good
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Yeah, definately not too shabby right out of the box!
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Another great review mate.
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Thanks Dave. It’s surprising how few reviews (often none) there are out there for some of these pieces. I get it that FoW and 15mm gaming in general aren’t 40k, but I’d still have expected to see more – so I guess that’s a niche I can pretty easily fill for a lot of these.
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Ooooh, those are nice! 🙂
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They’re one of my favourite sets I’ve opened up so far, I have to say.
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Those look like they’ll do the job very nicely.
As you say ready to go out of the box.
Cheers,
Pete.
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Yeah – ready to open up and drop right onto the table out of the box while looking pretty good.
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I think these are a bit higher quality than the desert pieces overall. I would be tempted to add a bit more weathering/battle damage to them but even with that said, these are ready to game with which is pretty cool. I’m slogging away on some terrain right now and can see the value of not having to do much work!
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I think the main thing that stands out to me in terms of qualty is that these have painted internals. The western style of building has a lot more detail to it, (especially in damaged form), and as you’ve seen, I had to hold my tongue (pen? keyboard?) as I’d been doing just as you suggested – but wanted to get the reviews of the “out of the box” models done first.
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It was a nice surprise to be sure! I shouldn’t have been too shocked because I feel like you’ve done this sort of thing in the recent past to great results 🙂
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With each of these reviews its kinda hard to se how anyone can go wrong with them. Out of the box they are very presentable, and with a small “tart up” they can really stand out.
I look forward to seeing you have them arranged on the tabletop.
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Thanks Anthony! I’m hoping to get a game (or two!) in over the next week as I’ll be wrappng work up for the year this afternoon.
Assuming it happens, there will be pics! 🙂
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Great (again) review. Agree, value for the money indeed.
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Thanks Mark – cheers!
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