Rubble City from Fenris Games

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I've talked about board games. I've talked about inserts to help manage storage of your games. And today I'm talking about more ways to bling out your board game, RPG or miniatures game. I backed the Kickstarter for Rubble City from Fenris Games. This is a set of resin cast terrain pieces for a ruined building (or 2 or 3 depending on how many sets you get).  I backed at the single building level since I wanted to see how they would turn out.

This past weekend I finally got around to painting most of them and I was amazed at how they turned out. Now, I will probably use mine more for tabletop miniature games. But if you are playing Journeys in Middle Earth and want to spice up your battle boards, I can't recommend these enough. The castings are clean and take paint easily. The detail is amazing and the little bits of rubble that come with the wall and door pieces, really help sell the idea of ruins.

They come as sort of a gray-tan resin. I primed mine black (2 full coverage coats to get everywhere). Then, using some Army Painter paints, did a heavy drybrush of dark stone gray and then a lighter gray. I picked out some random stones with an orangish beast fur and a desert khaki. Finally I finished the whole thing with a Soft Tone wash. Everything you see above took me about 2 hours and some of that time was waiting for paint to dry.

Another thing I like about the set is the fact that you get some wall pieces that can be slotted together. If you don't glue them (and you don't have to as the fit is tight enough for them to stay together on their own) then you can configure and add to these walls as your needs change. Some of the straight wall pieces can also be stacked on top of the larger walls to go even taller.

A couple of things to note:

First, Fenris Games cast most of their items to order. They don't keep a lot of stock on hand, you have to be willing to wait for items to be finished and they could take several weeks.

Second, you can probably find paper buildings and possibly even some laser-cut MDF cheaper. The set below is £30 (about $38.00). I think that is an extremely reasonable price for the quality and quantity that you receive, but if budget is a concern, scratchbuilt is probably a cheaper way.

Below is everything you get for the price above. These are scaled for 28/30mm miniatures so most miniature and board games should be able to use them with no issue. I have also used them in conjunction with fantasy dungeon walls to create some ruined tunnel areas.


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