PAPERCRAFT BUILDINGS AND TERRAIN FOR WARGAMES

Quite a few times I have been asked about the buildings I use when playing Fear of the Dark  or Frontline Heroes: Fields of Normandy, and I think they deserve their own post... 

When I started with the idea of ​​playing skirmish wargames alone and at home, I had several problems, the buildings I wanted to use as terrain (resin, 3D, mdf, plastic ...) were expensive and take up a lot of space. Think that we are dealing with solo wargamers, and most of them have to store their miniatures and terrain at home.

"They were expensive" ... Many of you will think that they are not expensive for the quality and detail they offer, but of course, if we think that I play solo, the cost in mdf (for example) of a city that fills a 3x3 ft (90x90 cms) game board, being just one person who pays for all the buildings becomes too expensive... 

And if we talk about making several settings (modern, fantasy, scifi), then that´s quite a lot of money... 

"they take up a lot of space"... Buildings to represent a city on a 3x3 ft (90x90 cms) game board take up quite a lot of room at home, and we are not talking about shelves or boxes in a club, we are talking about a house where I live with my wife, two little boys and a cat...  for example...

So in my search for a solution I found cardboard buildings: they are cheap and if I could find a way to store them without occupying much space they would be my best option.

These are some examples of the settings that I have made for wargaming at home, but let´s go one step further...

Most papercraft buildings are designed to be made and stay that way glued, being impossible to fold them without breaking them, and then the buildings, although being cheap, they take the same room as a resin or mdf one. Did I tell you that I live with my wife, two kids and a cat?

As I didn´t find buildings that could be folded flat I chose to design them myself so that they could be folded and could be stored without occupying a lot. 

Based on papercraft buildings from companies such as worldworks games, fat dragon games and Z-war one boardgame, I "redesigned" the buildings so that they could be folded, separating walls and roof. 

I made a few houses printed in A3 on 200 grms paper, look at the result, and see how those houses look once glued and how much space they take once they are stored... 

In the last photo you have an example game board with these houses.

Apart from that small town I wanted to have a city setting, and I wanted the roofs to be playable, so they needed a flat surface.

Once again, using models that I bought from companies that sell them online to make building models that can´t be folded I modified them.

The idea is that the walls of houses or buildings should be square or rectangular, so that when folded they fit perfectly.

Each wall of the building is joined to the next wall using a fixing tape that is called invisible, which is completely transparent and matte, so that it is barely visible.

This fixing tape is what will act as a hinge so that the sides of the building can be folded together.

The roof of the building will act as a stopper to hold the structure in place while we play. In addition, it will be tough enough to attach miniatures on it.

Here we see how it is folded and how we assemble it, in the last photo, with minis and some terrain. 

In addition to all these advantages if you are accustomed to using photoshop or other image editing software you can even modify the buildings to make them look like collapsed buildings.

In this table I modified the buildings to make them look like they had been destroyed during a heavy bombing, they were foldable and had pieces of floor to use to play with the heights.

There will be people who think that the idea of using papercraft is not good, but for me it is because the cost is the cheapest I have found, I can make many houses of different settings and most important, it allows me to keep everything in a single box...

I usually use recycled boxes (I have many of the same) with the measures 38x28x10 cm, the same kind of boxes you may have at home.

Inside those boxes I can put an entire city and still I have plenty of spare room. Everything you see in the second photo is in that box (buildings, streets, lampposts, trash cans ...), and as you can see, there is plenty of room left.

In the box in which I put the middle east town, I had so much spare space that I put all the palm trees, small terrain pieces, figures ...

And maybe you think that this system works with simple structures, because another kind of structures would be more difficult to fold. Well, this is the las terrain piece that I made myself from a Dave Graffam model.

... or even a f#*?@#g huge lighthouse!!

All the buildings you see in this pictures are modified versions of products you can buy online, so I'm going to make a small list of the best companies I have found:

Worldworks games, has plenty of houses and buildings for several settings (medieval/fantasy, modern, far west, scifi...)

Fat Dragon games (nice selection of medieval/fantasy and modern/20´s buildings)

Stoetzel models (several modern/20´s buildings and houses)

Dave Graffam (fantasy/medieval houses)

This options are really cheap (think around 1-4$ for a big building and you can print as much as you want) but there are other FREE options that you may consider as well:

Zwarone is a really good zombie boardgame that is worth to be considered for zombie apocalypse games, and in their web page they offer to download for free a set of several houses that have a really good quality (I use many of them when I play).

Papermau is a website full of free papercraft, you can spend a whole afternoon checking this webpage to find real treasures. It has a good search engine to look for what you need (try house, boat, egyptian temple... for example).

There are many more companies, but these ones listed above have the highest quality/lowest price that I have found, and apart from such a huge amount of buildings, they have mats, scatter terrain, bridges and almost anything you may need for your wargaming table. 

Well, I hope I have satisfied your curiosity, and as always, I hope to encourage you to play alone...

Don't let terrain and scenery be a problem...