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Battlefield in a Box 

Urban Battlefields - Apartment Blocks
with Chris Townley
Last week I wrote a short article about a table I was setting up for a game. This week I decided to delve in an take a closer look at the Apartment Building in particular as I had quite a bit of fun playing around with how I was going to 'set it up' on the table.

Urban Battlefields...

Flames Of War Buildings Range... Team Yankee Modern Battlefield in a Box Range...
Chris' Town

The reason I found it so interesting working with the Apartment Block is that other than Roads (and Car Parks) you don't often put multiples of a single building on a table as the repetition can look a little odd.

The Apartment Block is the building that breaks the rule because it looks better in multiples.

On the left is an image from last weeks article where the 3 buildings grouped together look like a larger complex.

Chris' Town

So as an intellectual exercise I started playing around with the Apartment Block and some supporting terrain to see if I could come up with something that looked like a multi-storey, multi-unit building that would not only look interesting on the table, but also provide a tactical challenge to players with mutiple points of entry and firing points on all sides.

As you can see I grabbed 3 buildings and placed them touching each other. Part of the design brief for the Apartment Block was to have flush sides to enable them to be placed in contact with each other to make a bigger building.

Chris' Town
Chris' Town

From here I started adding all the extra pieces of terrain to help to fit in with the surroundings. A paved square for the Apartment to sit on, Carpark out the back for the residents, roads and then of course the McPizzaKing and Convenience Store across the road.

All I would need to add is a Cafe and I think Monica, Chandler, Joey and the rest of the crew would be happy there.

More Is Good?
From here I started to play around more buildings, adding a fourth Apartment Building (a pre-production test model in Grey in this case) to build a bigger complex and basing the whole thing over two cobblestone squares.

 Chris' Town

Taller is Better?
Next up I added extra levels to one apartment (at the expense of the other two) making a nice tall building for people who like climbing stairs.

Chris' Town

What Do I Like?
Personally I really like the idea of a block of 3 buildings sitting together in a nice group, subtracting and adding levels from two of the buildings to create different heights in the block. I would also be tempted to repeat the design a second time on a table to create a really decent sized group of buildings. Thanks to the Roads and Car Parks ringing the building tanks and other vehicles will still have plenty of room to maneuver whilst infantry have a really fun section of the battlefield to fight it out over.

Try pulling out some of your terrain and playing around as a civil engineer for a little while. It really was a fun exercise to look at how the buildings can go together in harmony as opposed to just 'plonking' them on a table and thinking about which buildings should go near each other.

~ Chris

Chris' Town


Last Updated On Wednesday, October 11, 2017 by Chris at Battlefront