The gps of gaming! 48 interchangable tiles of detailed terrain goodness. I know I'm WAY behind where I intended to be with the modeling this year. But I've finished painting these tiles and their accompanying accessories, PLUS the gorgeous hive tiles I ordered from the local GW shop. Because they come on the sprue already looking gorgeous, there's little I did at all except paint them. Well, except the one hive tile...I did kinda want to make a bigger hive city so...
Trimmed Dark Eldar rifles make great gothic looking towers for this kind of scale -- (also true for Battlefleet Gothic ships and space stations.) The central spire is a shell from a WW2 military set. For that particular Hive city tile I painted the base largely navy and blue and used Games Workshop's brush on gloss varnish to give it the appearence of an absolutely gigantic hive city clinging to the only land mass around for protection or necessity. But imagine that tile on a map necessitating an amphibious assault on a hive city, then dove tailing into a game of Cities of Death. Man...
Which brings me back around to the rest of the box set tiles. Out of the 48 tiles, 6 are single sided -- scultped spaceports. Still, that's 42 double sided tiles... that's 84 sides to play with in sculpted groups of 14... Meaning there are 14 individual sides before they repeat pattern; that's 6 solid terrain types to craft with the paintbrush. And with these tiles, you'd have to try deliberately to screw them up as far as painting goes. With little effort and some dry brushing they become instantly beautiful. But that's assuming you want just 6 terrain types, or full sets of each. I did opt for that with 4 sets of the 14 faces:
set one: desert
set two: Snow (This was a powder blue undercoat, highlight with white, flat clear coat and blue glitter sparingly sprinlkled onto the flat parts as the clear coat set for that snowfield look.
set three: general green/brown/water
set four: Black ash wastes leaning towards volcanic.
The rest I mixed up, not sticking to any one scheme, including swamps, melting snows, darker churned up earth looks. Just to get a decent mix to build a playable landscape.
Best thing about them is they're not necessarily 40K specific. First of all, buying this:
...and marrying the two sets is an ideal set up. But they are still general enough to be used hundreds of ways for ANY map based campaign for whatever game seems appropriate, from wargames to rpg's to fusions of those to the Games Workshop products they're designed for. Just a brilliant piece of gaming goodness from GW!
