I just received the BATTLEZONES: SCI-FI RUINED DISTRICT from the nice people at Mantic Games, so I’d thought I would share my thoughts as I worked my way through a box, building and painting up a few new buildings for my Deadzone board 🙂

Out the Box: First off here’s how the sprues look straight out of the box:

…as well as a sprue of the connectors common to all of the Battlezones terrain.

As we’ve come to expect from this kinda terrain it’s very nice stuff. Strong, detailed and easy to get together :). It’s a nice variety as well allowing all kinds of ruins to be built from this set alone, combine it with some of the Urban terrain and you could make some truly unique buildings for any game. For Deadzone everything you get is perfect, suits the game really well and is the perfect size and shape for it. For other games it’s a bit more restricted as it sticks to a 3″ x 3″ cube format, although a little extra work and you can make them into any weird and wonderful shape you wish.

Building: I had a few ideas spinning around as to what I wanted to build up with these. A couple of small ruins would be perfect to act as individual sections of cover or positioned in the right spot, separated parts of the same building :), and I wanted to see what could be made up only with this box, so I started cutting and gluing and got these…

The terrain only needs a wee bit of cleaning up, a few sections where they were clipped from the sprue as well as getting rid of mold lines in the hole connectors would be slotted into. You get a few rubble sections that act as a connector, which you can see in the top left of the picture. It’s a simple but cool piece that adds to the overall look of a ruined building nicely.

There was also a couple of sections that allow for some free-standing rubble. Here’s how they look straight out of the box with a smidgen of glue (they come as two halves that slot together)…

Combining with the Urban Box: I also wanted to create a couple of bigger buildings like the Bar and Cafe that I’d worked on previously. Something with character, which meant (to me anyway)it should be a target, something that the Council would want rid of in the event of containment protocols and therefore ‘ruined’.

The first idea was a coms station of some sort and after fiddling about for a few hours I put this together…

I managed to make it almost exclusively with bits from the ruins box and spares bits from an Urban district box. Anything I couldn’t find a suitable piece for from the Battlezones parts I used a few varieties of plastic bit’s and pieces instead, most of which I got from the local hobby shop. I’m going to continue adding some extras onto this building to help increase the character.

After all that I still have a fair few bits leftover to do another building, which in my head at present should be some kind of lab or medical centre, have to see what I can do…