Battle Systems Fantasy Village and Village Ruins Preview

Tabletop wargames, along with requiring miniatures to represent your forces, always look better on a battlefield filled with terrain for the forces to fight over. Along with keeping games fresh and interesting by changing up the battlefield, they also make your games look great. Making your own scenery, especially making it look good, can require a lot of time, skill, and tools and some pre-made scenery can be expensive, or bulky to store and transport. Luckily, Battle Systems produces a range of awesome-looking pre-printed card scenery for a variety of battlefield types.

Their scenery is not only durable but also includes an insane amount of detail that really adds depth of character to your tabletop. In this article, we're going to take a look at the Fantasy Village and Village Ruins sets, looking at what each set contains, and some of the wargaming miniatures they work with.

Fantasy Village

Battle System's Fantasy Village contains an incredible amount of terrain for the size of the box. All of the scenery is modular and can be used to create a variety of different types of structures, but working through the tutorials the set buildings that can be built out of the box are:

• 1 Tavern
• 1 Town House
• 1 Storage Barn
• 1 Lake House
• 1 Thatched Cottage
• 1 Outbuilding
• 3 Raised Walkways
• 15 Stilt Supports and Steps
• 15 Fence Sections
• 1 Double-sided Lake/Large Bog
• 2 Double-sided Ponds/Small Bogs
• 3 Staircases
• 6 Ladders
• 1 Well
• 1 Baggage Cart
• 1 Hand Cart
• 2 Rowing Boats
• 51 Assorted Furniture Pieces
• 85 Assorted Scatter Components and Accessories

The Tavern is the largest structure in the Fantasy Village. It's built as a two-storey building with a removable roof and upper floor. We've photographed it below so you can see the basic structure and layout, but with the furniture and scatter terrain that comes with the scenery box it looks even better.

All of the Roofs come off easily, and you can clip each level so that they come off clean, allowing you to continue battle across multiple indoor levels.

The Fantasy Village Lake House comes with a small lake piece, two ponds, two boats, and three pieces of raised deck that can be attached to the house, which is also raised. The water pieces are double-sided with clear water and a swamp side. We're going to add the Water Mill and an additional Lake House, which are available separately, to make a swamp set for our Malifaux Bayou table.

Along with the Tavern and Lake House, the Fantasy Village includes four other large structures. The two-storey townhouse, two-storey storage barn with outside struts and winch, the thatched cottage with its chimney, and a roofed outhouse.

The Fantasy Village set includes loads of furniture, including a well, two carts, a bar for the tavern, tables, chairs, chests, barrels, beds, fencing, bookcases with individual books, a fireplace, a weapons rack, and a storage chest that fits into a building wall, to have a table inside and a chest outside. The set also contains loads of other little details like bowls, some signs, and even a bell to put on the bar.

The Fantasy Village Terrain works well with any 28-35mm wargaming system, as can be seen in the photos above and below with some miniatures for scale. The planks, stairs, and internal features accommodate miniatures well and allow for some very dynamic gameplay.

Village Ruins

Battle System's Village Ruins contains a large amount of modular terrain that can be used to create a variety of different types of structures for a variety of ruined buildings. Contained in the box is:

• 30 Assorted Wall Panels
• 14 Assorted Floor Tiles
• 4 Assorted Roof Panels
• 6 Gable Panels
• 3 Barricades
• 3 Walkways/Planks
• 6 Assorted Ladders
• 31 Assorted Scatter Components and Accessories

The Village Ruins set can be used to create two two-storey structures with roofs, a two-storey structure without a roof and four broken structures, along with several planks to join the upper levels and three barricades. Combining this set with the full Fantasy Village set means that it can be used to create a whole battlefield of damaged structures, with buildings with half-damaged roofs, taverns missing one side, and taller multi-level damaged structures for vertical games.

Combining both the Fantasy Village and Village Ruins set can fill a 3x3 foot battlefield well, and having two sets of each can make for a perfect claustrophobic city-streets battlefield, perfect for Mordheim.

Battle Systems Fantasy Terrain

These are just two of the sets available under Battle Systems Fantasy Terrain line. We've already previewed the Northern Settlement and Ruined Monastery, and they have more traditional buildings available, along with a huge watchtower and an incredible Blacksmith's Forge.

All of their terrain to very simple to put together with clips, so it can be taken apart for storage and transport. Full tutorials are available online for each set, and once you've put together a few structures, it's very easy to start playing around to create your own buildings.

The Fantasy Village box is enough to fill a 3x3 gaming board, giving limited line of sight, and up to a 4x4 if you're looking to space the buildings out. The Village Ruins gives sporadic cover in a 2x2 or offers an awesome section for larger boards, or if you're just looking to use the walls as line of sight blocking terrain, can be used on larger battlefields.

The copies of the Fantasy Village and Village Ruins used in this preview were provided by Battle Systems.