The next major bit of terrain I want to tackle is the infamous BUA (Built Up Area) known to the man in the street as villages and towns. Since I will be using 6mm figures almost exclusively with this box, an obvious solution is 6mm buildings. They are small, cheap and I already own a good collection. But relative to the likely ground scale of my games they will be far too big. I’d like my towns and villages to look that way - like clusters of buildings.

So we head to the drawing board to make a few towns. As always we start out with our criteria:

• Cheap: The whole idea is not to spend a mint on what is, after all, a project that will be used only occasionally, and mostly when access to a regular gaming set up is not available.
• Light: Hunks of metal buildings might crash around when the box is carried, and we don’t want that happening. So resin, foam or paper is preferred.
• Utility: In many games a unit may occupy a village. I want to be able to show this by putting troops actually in/on the village itself.

My first thought is of the forest stand with the removable base. Could I design a town that would have a hollow or removable center so I could put troops inside? One easy solution is to make an urban base that depicts the foot print of the town. When occupied, remove the town and replace with the troops. Easy, but I’d like something a bit more slick.

I rummage through my collection of buildings for all scales, and the solution presents itself. I have paper terrain with lift off sections to reveal damaged sections underneath. All I need now is to replicate this somehow. Looking through I see a collection of buildings from The Miniature Building Authority. When placed side by side, they form this kind of street scene:

What I need is a street scene like that that I can print out on card stock. By printing several and taping them together I’ll end up with a long strip of buildings. I can then fold this into a hollow square, and place it on a base. I’ll make a form out of match sticks that will act to hold the paper in place so it does not collapse into it’s folded state. For a test run I just use the banner above. I import it onto paint and edit it to look like this:

I drag this in to Powerpoint and resize it to 1/2” tall. I then crop off the ends ending up with an image 1/2” by 1 2/3” By stringing together 3 strips I get a 1/2” by 5” strip. I print a handful out on ordinary paper just to see how they size up. A few minutes with scissors and tape and I have my empty town box. Here it is in the box with some 6mm Russian Grenadiers for scale:

A couple things jump out right away. The buildings need to be taller. Even allowing for a certain aesthetic, these are just too small. I decide to try to increase the size to 1” tall. The strips are now over 9” long. Second, they obviously need to be double sided! It won’t matter if the fronts and rears match up so long as we get rid of the big white blob! Here is a revised test of the concept:

An obvious improvement. The resulting village has interior dimensions of 60x60mm. Perfect for my armies as they are all based on 20x20 or 20x15 bases, and occasionally use 60mm movement trays.

A few more notes:

• First, leave a strip at the bottom of the buildings. Fold this at right angles to the front. With a flap on the interior and exterior you will have good purchase. If you want to glue it to a permanent base, this will give you the surface area you need.
• These strips were folded lengthwise. That leaves a large open top (you can see bits of white paper along each top edge). I’ll make strips that can be folded vertically to solve that problem.
• It may be desirable to fill the empty center when the village is unoccupied. A simple paper box with a reconnaissance photo as the top could be printed, folded and placed inside. A photo similar to this (one without the text labels) might be edited to do the job:
  
• I may replace the green above the roofs with sky blue. I am not going to try and trim the pieces to the roof lines.
• I intend to leave these un-based so they can be folded flat for storage and transport. It only takes 2 minutes to print, cut and assemble one, so if they have to be replaced once in a while, the convenience will be worth it!

Obviously this same concept can be applied to lots of other terrain types. Heck, if you can live with squares you could do forests this way. But I’m thinking of stone walls, fences, hedges and hedge rows, or anything that is generally tall but with a small footprint.

Endorsement: By the way, Miniature Building Authority make spanking good buildings. I buy pretty much every thing they make in 15mm size. Often I get duplicates. They come painted and assembled. They all have accessible interiors, either with a lift off roof, or else they have a removable top that leaves behind a destroyed version of the same building. Pricey but worth every penny in my opinion. Plus they come in boxes with styrofoam cut outs. Safe storage and the boxes have labels/photos so you know what is in each box!

Up next: Rivers, streams, ponds and other water features.

[Battlefield In A Box] [Terrain: Part 1] [Terrain Part 2: Woods] [Terrain Part 3: The Hills] [Terrain Part 4: Towns] [Terrain Part 5: Rivers & Streams] [Terrain Part 6: Rivers II] [Final Touches] [Post Mortem]