Terrain masters Bandua are expanding their historicals range with a newly recut and recoloured North African/Middle Eastern set, the very appropriately named Medina range. With their Viking, European Medieval and European WW2 sets all receiving the official Goonhammer Historicals thumbs up on review, I’ve really put this new set through it’s paces – let’s see what we’re getting here.
Thanks to Bandua for sending this out for review.
The Medina range is a nine-building set comprising seven houses (four of them two-storey), one large mosque and a minaret. The set – as reviewed here – is available as the Medina Terrain Pack on the Bandua site. At around £150 at the time of writing (€169.99), it’s a fairly chunky investment that promises a full table – or more – of high quality pre-printed terrain. It will work for a variety of Historical periods (anything from about 700-present) in North Africa and the Middle East, in addition to fantasy, science fiction settings and weird historicals.
Construction
The buildings arrive as flat-packs that are well packed, and this is important as you’re likely to be ordering these from quite some distance – despite shipping from Spain, not a single component arrived loose or damaged. Smaller buildings are on two sheets – one with exterior/interior wall printing and one with floors, roofs and window details. Every component is easy to remove from the surrounding MDF, and, with the single exception of the square window frames on the Mosque, requires no thought to punch out beyond keeping everything in the right order.
Instructions are useful, as they always are with terrain building, but I would argue not essential – the walls and floors are keyed to each other in each building so that there are very few ways to go wrong. Everything slots together exceptionally well. I found after assembling the first building slowly, all the others came together over the course of one work from home lunch break, which is a fairly insane statement given that this is enough terrain to do a full urban board on a 4×4 or a village on a 6×4.
Construction and design is clever enough to leave every floor accessible for gameplay if you want to. Single storey buildings have easily removable roofs, and multi-storey buildings can be dissembled for storage or play if you want to get really into the skirmish possibilities of an urban board. That’s true of quite a lot of terrain, but the clever thing here is that the removable roofs and storeys slot together in the same tongue and groove construction as the walls – they’re not precariously sitting on top where an errant elbow can knock them off, but held robustly into the building.
Since I’ve mentioned robustness, this is tough stuff – while the Viking Terrain was tested by giving it to a 16 month old, the Medina terrain was handed to the two and a bit year old that 16 month old became. He ran around, dropped it a few times, took the roof off and filled it with minor Thomas the Tank Engine Characters, all without damage. Suffice to say this will stand up to the rigours of gaming and storage very well.
Graphics
Everything in the pack is 100% ready to go once assembled, with high quality printed graphics on walls, roofs/floors and, on the minaret and mosque, lovely additional tiled detail that looks appropriately North African. The quality of the printing is excellent, a step up from the already good Viking kits, and there’s no glossiness to spoil photos or break the kind of verisimilitude you’re after on the tabletop. The base texture of slightly worn plaster is great, and the irregular exposed brickwork looks very real, particularly where it runs into the edge of the MDF sheet.
I was very pleased to see some intricate ornamentation on the mosque and minaret, and this has been printed well, adding a lovely, appropriate and visually interesting bit of detail to both structures.
While I haven’t seen the earlier version of this set in the flesh, from the images provided on the website this is a major upgrade – these buildings look used and weathered, very real compared to other MDF offers or the prior version. I was impressed by how good it looks with no additional work and you could absolutely, 100%, toss these down on the table immediately after construction.
Scaling
These are pretty firmly in the general 25-32mm range that most of us are playing at, and worked well with my historicals armies as well as the occasional errant space marine or zombie I use for scaling shots. Unlike a lot of terrain, they feel appropriately sized beyond the doors being big enough – you can fit a lot of models into these and they definitely feel “right”, as big as they would be if our miniatures were actually real. That’s nice – if you’re thinking “well, all terrain does”, go grab some from your collection because it’s probably far, far, too small. There is so much space inside these buildings for play that you absolutely must keep the roofs removable – full, playable, urban board!
This is best seen in the mosque and minaret. Both are huge. The mosque is appropriately the centrepiece of the set, with masses of floorspace and several levels. The minaret is enormous, the main body a good four storeys high, with a fantastic balcony for the Muezzin to call the faithful to prayer.
If you’ve already got a fair bit of terrain in this kind of style, you’ll be pleased to know this works alongside other major ranges. It does stand as a kind of half-way house between the bare MDF of the simplest terrain – like the Warbases House below – and the thick hard plastic of the Renedra Mud Brick House, but I think looks good alongside both.
Impressions
I wasn’t sure what to call this section of the review. It could have just been “You lot, this was a huge amount of fun,” because to test this out I ended up making a full town layout. And then another one. And a third. And then I couldn’t resist and actually solo played a full game of Barons’ War with it and immediately thought of how fun it would be to run Guards of Traitors Toll, too. This set is immense fun to play around with on the board. Where does the Mosque go? Are the two storey houses wealthier ones, would they be closer? If I put this building here and this one there, could a model Assassins Creed-style freerun across the entire town?
I also had a go at adding a little more three dimensional detail to one of the houses – very simply adding some scattered sand piles under areas with the damaged plaster graphic and adding some static grass around the base. Roughly covering the MDF edges with a vaguely similar paint was the next step, and I think it’s classed up the already fantastic terrain and made it blend nicely into my board. With a little scatter, some trees, possibly some roads and paths, I think this is just a bloody gorgeous set. I could barely tear myself away from the photography, which is why this is the best illustrated article I’ve ever written.
Price Comparison
At €169, the Medina Terrain pack does represent a solid investment for terrain. It’s in about the middle of the price range of the major full-colour MDF suppliers, so I think it’s a reasonable price point – you’re getting a lot here and I’d be very surprised if this didn’t make for a great club purchase to outfit several boards in addition to nutters like me for whom the words “full urban historicals” have an irresistible lure. If you’d like to pick up some, but not all, of this set, the single storey houses are incredibly reasonable at 14 euros – cheaper than most unpainted comparable MDF terrain.
Overall
When I was quite literally wandering around my house shouting “look at this!” to my wife and son, I got a message from our own Soggy saying “a few people can be a bit enthusiastic” about Bandua kits and I assured him I’d bring my usual scalpel-like sharpness to the reviews, because I do put a lot of effort into assessing what’s good and bad about kits that I work with.
Well Soggy it turns out I am immensely enthusiastic about this. It’s easy to put together, it’s sized perfectly for play, interiors are easily accessible, it looks flat out great en masse, it offers a lot of opportunity to expand and, as if all that isn’t enough, the printing, patterns and textures are exceptional. I think it’s chunky enough, real-looking enough and interesting enough to mix in not just with other MDF terrain but anything you have in your collection – or want to have – and if you’re thinking of games set in North Africa, the Middle East, all the way to the borders of India, or an area-inspired fantasy or 40k board, you won’t go wrong with this. For Historicals readers, the range and utility of this set is absolutely immense – hundreds of years and dozens of areas – and I’m determined to integrate it into my multi-period Nakam Aya’If project.
The only thing I can suggest is more – let’s see a madrasa, a caravanserai or funduq, wells, a vaulted souk, palaces, fortifications, ruins, whatever else the great minds at Bandua can think up, because whatever it is, I’m getting it.
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