There have been a number of recent skirmish games that present something of a hobby paradox – while they are relatively light on the requirements in terms of the number of models in a force, they either benefit from, or outright require, a heavy investment in terrain. Conquest and The Baron’s War both come to mind, but perhaps the best example of this type of game is Guards of Traitor’s Toll. While one could pull off a full unit of Guards in a productive afternoon of painting, they’re likely to be outnumbered by townsfolk that need to be painted by 5:1 or more, and the game really works best on a dense urban terrain layout.
While there’s not much to help with the first problem, Sarissa Precision might have the answer to the second, in the form of their full-color Tollingchester terrain line.
Sarissa Precision generously provided the kits for this review.
What Is It?
Part of Sarissa’s CMYK line of full color MDF terrain, Tollingchester is designed for Guards of Traitor’s Toll, and provides the basis for a densely populated fantasy city board, consisting of houses, merchant shops, walls, market stalls, etc. The style is deliberately fantastic, with the sort of unrealistic construction that often involved – all the walls sloped slightly outward, chimneys whose design can best be described as “whimsically janky”, and tall towers stuck to the side of otherwise innocuous buildings. It fits the feeling of Guards perfectly, but would be equally at home representing one of the more in-tact districts of Mordheim (or Altdorf), a more urban Burrows and Badgers board, or any one of a number of fantasy RPG settings.
The core building designs are quite clever, being made up of essentially “Small House”, “Medium Building” and “Large Building”, that then plunge into combinations of “Pinkish or Green”, “Tile or Shingle Roof”, “More Windows or More Doors?” and “Brick or Stone Foundation” to provide a surprising amount of visual variety while keeping to several basic forms. When you combine this with the freely positionable dormers, balconies and bay windows, and chimneys, each building can end up being endowed with a lot of individual character. When I was building mine, I found myself telling stories about each one. There are also a number of add-on shops, towers, etc. that fit snug against the basic buildings, again allowing both for more variety and, especially valuable in Guards, breaking up straight lines.
The Build
Sarissa generously provided me with the entire “Full Color Tabletop Starter”, which was an intimidating amount of resin, even given some of my previous experience building MDF Zone Mortalis boards. The way the sets are organized is great however – a glossy sheet of paper with the instructions on one side and a picture of the finished project on the other, followed by the appropriate MDF sheets, then another sheet of paper for the next building, etc. This seems like a simple thing but having occasionally gotten just a pile of MDF sheets and URL to download instructions, it was a welcome bit of organizational help.
The instructions themselves were…adequate. Given the amount of color involved, I would have liked to see better indicators for what facing, colored or bare MDF, a particular piece should be in. This sometimes had to be intuited. Similarly, I never really did figure out if I was supposed to glue the roofs down. The full colored floors now trapped inside a PVA-sealed building suggested no, but the massive holes in some of those floors where the parts for the building’s staircase said yes, and I found the buildings more structurally stable once the roofs were in place.
The kits themselves fell into what I find to be the familiar pattern with MDF – something of a slog with the first kit, figuring out what goes where, how much you can dry fit before you need to start to glue, etc. and then the rest going swiftly. The whole set was assembled over the course of three nights, and went together with Sarissa’s characteristic, well, precision.
There are two traits that I want to call out specifically, one good and one less so. The good one is the material itself. The CMYK line comes with a somewhat rough, very glossy texture from the printing process. This surface is very forgiving, which is delightful. More than once I ended up changing my mind about something, a piece would slip, etc. after glue had been trying enough that on most MDF kits would cause some pretty serious cosmetic damage. On these kits? You could hardly tell anything happened. This was a delightful discovery, and one I genuinely appreciate. This also extends to the protection provided by the coating – it stood up to using a knife to scrape off a bit of PVA glue with no discernable harm. By all appearances the coating on these kits is durable as hell.
The more negative trait comes from the intersection of the instructions and how the kits are designed. MDF kits, like their 1:1 scale IKEA cousins, are the kind of thing that are only really stable once they’re fully assembled or close to it. This is especially true for the Tollingchester buildings, because as mentioned previously, nothing is square. The “core” of most of the buildings are eight slightly slanted ribs, each connecting to a smaller lower floor and a larger upper floor. The various wall panels, etc. are then connected to these ribs. Sarissa’s instructions – as least how I understood them to work upon reading the instructions. That, friends, was a recipe for frustration. I ended up finding that gluing the struts to the walls and then slotting them one by one onto the floor-frames was far less frustrating. But that’s a minor quibble, and it only took a single building before I found my footing and they went together easily.
Making It Your Own
Despite being pre-painted, I found that the Tollingchester set was rife with customization potential. The multitude of dormers, buttresses, towers and storefront add-ons that come with the set (and can be purchased separately) invite customization. Setting out with the notion that bilateral symmetry was the enemy, I was able to make every building look unique, like it had a story, and not like a series of uniform, flat-sided trapezoids.
There’s also room for other improvements, and follow-ons to the pre-printed color work. While I am generally skeptical of weathering powders on terrain generally, due to how much it’s handled, the very whimsical chimneys could take a layer of soot, etc. on them. Similarly, there’s plenty of nooks, crannies, and corners that would be amendable to the sort of moss effects you can get mixing very fine flock and PVA glue.
Finally, and this I intend to do on my set, is perhaps knocking down the shine a little. There’s two reasons for this – while the very hard, very nicely colored surface is very appealing, it is also very shiny. The other is that thin layers of PVA glue dry matte, which means you can see everywhere you’ve made a bit of a mess, a part has slipped a bit, etc. in the difference in sheen, even if the surface is forgiving enough that it doesn’t impact the overall appearance. This seems to only come up when viewing the pieces from certain angles, but it still annoys me. As an experiment, I sprayed one of the dormers with Krylon matte sealant (picture below) and well…now that they are on the buildings, I can’t tell which is which.
Scale and Compatibility
One of the big questions with any terrain set is “How well it works with my existing terrain collection”. To be blunt, the Tollingchester stuff is large. It’s not out of scale with any models – an array of potential skirmish models all look in-scale with the building doors and porches, and the market goods from the Wargames Atlantic set that came with The Baron’s War starter look fine as scatter pieces.
It’s only really when put next to some other buildings that the larger scale of the buildings become evident. A Games Workshop Laketown house, another strong contender for Guards scenery, is absolutely dwarfed in comparison.
A cathedral from Printable Scenery, which was the source of files I was going to use to 3d print a Guards board on my modest small holder print farm, is similarly fairly small. It should be the dominant center point in town. Instead, it’s rivaled in size by the Tollingchester bank-guild fortress combo that is, admittedly, one of the larger buildings in question.
What this shapes up as is that Tollingchester is decidedly “Heroic Scale” amongst the pantheon of 28mm terrain. It’s not telling against any particular range of models, but if you’re incorporating it into an existing terrain collection, if might be worth double checking how the buildings will look side by side. Personally, I like the larger look of the buildings – it helps with that feeling for Guards that the city is the setting and one of the characters, and from a pragmatic perspective, it’s easier to build a dense board with larger buildings.
Pricing
The price for the starter set being reviewed here is currently $309, which with current shipping rates is $344 sent to the United States. That’s a substantial price that nets seven buildings, some walls and walkways, market booths, etc. It’s a very strong starter set, but the pricing definitely puts it in the premium category, which is not typically where people put MDF terrain. Keeping that in mind, and knowing that I am someone who uses the phrase “the time value of money” unironically at times, I do think the pricing makes sense. In three days, rather than having a pile of assembled terrain that isn’t painted, I am done. I realize I’m the perfect target market for something like this – pressed for time, wanting something finished, and with a tendency to overcommit to terrain projects. With the flexibility of the set, how many games it can work for, etc. I think it’s appealing. Not the most affordable option, but one that has a decent value proposition. I think there’s an especially good case for clubs, game stores and the like where a rugged, minimal effort and flexible table’s worth of terrain will find plenty of use.
Final Thoughts
I confess that I was skeptical of this kit when it came out – I hadn’t picked it up when I picked up basically everything else. My plan was indeed to 3d print the board I needed. I’ve printed that set, and it is currently sitting in a box waiting for painting in my ample free time. Instead, in three days, I have a full, honestly beautiful board of terrain that will work for several games that I can’t wait to play games on. The quality of the graphics are genuinely amazing, the buildings a perfect blend of whimsey and playability, and durable as all get out. But the highest praise I think I can give this set is that, having already worked through sheets and sheets of MDF and about half a bottle of PVA, I’m already looking at two other Tollingchester sets, with the potentially unhinged plan of building Traitor’s Toll University.
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