We’ve been looking to expand and diversify the terrain kits we use for the UK Goonhammer Opens, and a few months ago we got in touch with Bandua Wargaming to explore the option of using some of their (officially licensed) WTC terrain kits.

They were kind enough to send us a set to try out, alongside a few other goodies (including their Boarding Zone we looked at last month), and today we’re going to review these kits.

The short review is, well, that earlier this week my garage got filled with a pallet-load of these kits in different designs that we’ve purchased, because they’re great, and particularly well-suited to 10th Edition. The longer review follows.

As the opening suggests – we were provided with a review copy of this product free of charge, and Bandua are supporting the Goonhammer Open UK.

What Do You Get?

The set of terrain we’re looking at is the “All-In-One Pack – Imperial World 1” – a full WTC table set, retailing for 250€. It contains a massive amount of stuff.

The contents are:

• 6 Big Ls
• 6 Small Ls
• 6 Wall Sections
• 4 Crates
• 6 Forests
• 6 Craters

It’s important to stress that basically only the WTC thinks you need anywhere near this much terrain per table, and we’re expecting to use two sets of this per three tables at the Goonhammer Open. Below you can see a layout that Liam and I were testing out in one of our 10th Edition practice games, using four each of the Big Ls, Small Ls and Wall Sections.

This was easily enough terrain, closer to too much than too little, and as TOs the fact that we’re very happy that we’re going to get three tables per two sets is a big part of why we’re going in on this. Not the only reason, however – much like Bandua’s other products, there’s a few killer features that make this ideal for the busy tournament organiser on a tight time budget.

Assembly (and Disassembly)

Three things really, really standout with these kits:

• They are fully painted out of the box, and done with a printing process that means you really don’t need to do anything else with them to make them table ready.
• They’re very quick to assemble – because the printed images do the heavy lifting of making things look nice, the actual assemblies are super simple.
• The ruins and wall sections can be assembled glue-free, then disassembled and flat packed.

The first two points are relatively self-explanatory, but the last one is very unique to the Bandua kits, and something I was at least somewhat skeptical of going into the assembly process. Having built the kits, my opinion is that for two out of the three pieces that follow this design, going glueless and flat packing them is a legitimate option.

For the wall sections, this just works by tension fitting – the way they’re designed, you can pop everything into place and it will end up pretty solid, easily solid enough for a terrain piece that will mostly just be there. I think there’s a risk that assembling/disassembling too often will end up breaking something, but the parts are fairly sturdy and go together neatly, so I’d expect them to survive a good few events, and at the point they did break you could just glue them then.

Obviously for ruins that won’t hack it, and this is where the Bandua designers have come up with something very clever. The ruin floors fit into the walls, and have little tabs that extend that you then slide a vertical bar through. This holds everything in place, and when you’re done you just lift them out the top and you can take everything apart into flat pieces, massively reducing storage space.

It sounds great – does it work? For the big ruins yes, and for my money that makes them some of the best big Ls on the market. Having two floors means that there are multiple contact points for the structural bars, so these end up satisfyingly solid once assembled. We’re planning to use this to our advantage – when we get our delivery for the UK GHO, the plan is to dry-assemble eight sets of these so I can retain them for the option of running local RTTs.

The smaller ruins use the same system, but with only one floor the results aren’t as good, and my honest recommendation is that you just glue these. The dry assembly works, but because there’s only one fixed contact point for the structural bar the results are pretty wobbly, and I think there’s a risk you’d accidentally knock one apart during a game. Unless you have zero storage space to play with I’d recommend just glueing these, and once that’s done they’re nice and solid.

All taken together – the glueless assembly is not perfect in all cases, but it works best on the bits that are the biggest pain to store assembled, which is a huge win. I should also say that just in general this stuff packs down quite a bit smaller than some other sets because it tesselates nicely – below is a full set of solid pieces, neatly packed for a trip to Liam’s garage.

The last solid pieces are the shipping containers, and while these aren’t glueless, I think the high-quality print really shines here – they assemble in minutes, and look quite a bit better than other MDF options or primed and drybrushed plastic kits. Big fan.

On top of these MDF bits, you also get six printed craters, and six forests consisting of printed footprints and plastic trees to position on them. These I can take or leave – they’re very functional, and I do like to have some area terrain on a table, but while the print quality is very good, entirely flat terrain (for the craters) on a full sized table just doesn’t really do it for me. If you are specifically aiming to play the WTC layouts they’re a good add-on, but will probably not see that much use in our setups (we might use two of the forests per table to try out the 10th Edition rules).

Using The Terrain

We’ve been making use of the Bandua terrain for some of the practice games of 10th Edition that Liam and I have been playing to test out the new rules, and I’m happy to report that I think these pieces work better for 10th Edition than they would have done in 9th.

The change in the way that ruins and footprints work means that I’m a lot less bothered about running small ruins without a base, which was a concern when we first looked at these. I already loved the big Ls, but the small ones really come into their own in the new rules. Similar things can be said about the wall sections and crates – now that these provide Cover when they partially obscure things, they add a lot of utility when placed around the table by themselves, where before you would need to have assembled a large enough collection of them to meaningfully block LoS. The wall sections you can see in the centre of the board in the game above played really nicely for us, and we’re definitely going to incorporate some into our event maps.

I’ve also got some good use out of the smaller ruins for Kill Team. The ones with the gaps in the side work very well for this, as they add some nice options for movement and taking cover.

A final nice thing I have to say about these kits is that, because of the way they’ve been designed on the MDF sheets, they fit together pretty tightly to pack up. Combined with the option to flat pack the ruins, these makes the kits appreciably easier to store than many equivalents.

Overall

My breakdown of these kits is roughly as follows:

• The Big-Ls are some of the very best on the market – they’re easy to assemble, highly functional, and the flat pack option adds a bunch here.
• The wall sections and crates are very valuable for 10th Edition, and the speed of assembly and looks really sell them.
• The small ruins are good and functional, but I don’t think the flat-packing works. They’re particularly good for Kill Team as well.
• The printed flat terrain is fine for WTC, but not needed if you aren’t aiming for those exact maps.

That’s a very strong showing overall, and if only a subset of that sounds like what you need, the individual kits (or a set of just the ruins) can also be purchased.

Thanks again to Bandua for providing a review copy, and I look forward to another sunny afternoon spent with the Goonhammer terrain building crew to address the giant heap of these sets that arrived this week!