Scenery: 4Ground Building Model

It's been a while since I included any posts around scenery. I know that in terms of game play, the niceties of scenery are basically meaningless. Also, I know that scenery for what is essentially a board game can be a challenge to include. For example, you don't typically have hexagonal buildings and roads running at 60 degree angles to each other.

While at Guns of August, BV Traders had a booth there and was showing some of their scenery. Given that Guns of August is a table top wargame convention, scenery is important, so Mike and Chuck brought scenery to sell (among other things). What caught my eye were these buildings from 4Ground Ltd, a company out of the UK. I had to buy one just to see what looked to be a great model. Lots of small pieces requiring careful construction. It is definitely not something super easy to build, but then the complexity was challenging and made it more satisfying to complete. Just wish my assembly skills for these things was just a bit better. If you're a beginner at such things, this 4Ground building would be extremely challenging. Making it a bit easier, though, is the precision of the cut on the pieces. Everything fits quite nicely together. CA glue is good for constructing these laser cut wood pieces, and a sharp razor knife a must for taking the parts off the sprues. The model itself is already painted, so no need to worry about that part. Lastly, the building is in three parts: the bottom of the building, a middle story, and the top. It is designed (and you can purchase) to allow for additional middle stories to be added or removed to adjust the height of the building when used, a handy feature for varying building heights.

After I built it, I needed to base it for use in our Battletech games. Luckily, we use 2"/50 mm hexes for games, so this building worked on four hex bases. I included some road hexes (Keith's version 2.0 roads). I still use the N scale rail bed for the roads, but paint the road hex bases instead of using flocking, which I think look better overall and likely will hold up a bit better. These can be seen in the picture below.