If you have been at all involved in the world of wargaming over the past two or three years, you will have noticed that the trend for independent companies to run Kickstarter style fundraisers for their new releases has become nearly ubiquitious, and with Mantic’s Deadzone, Kingdom Death’s Monster and Reaper Miniatures Bones and Bones II all raising millions of dollars, who can blame them.

In a thinly concealed effort to capture the zeitgeist, Corehammer’s elite team of writers will be writing about the projects we have been investing all the money we made from selling limited Games Day merchandise. I’ll be kickstarting (badum-tsh) this series with a piece on Battle Systems Modular Cardboard Terrain.

Battle Systems are a small Birmingham based company who have been selling downloadable paper terrain for a few years now. This in truth had very little appeal to me. It seemed to lack durability, and with even GW selling reasonably priced plastic terrain, seemed superfluous to my needs. Then, whilst reading a Deadzone thread on a message board, I saw this photo:

Noice.

A rush of memories hit me at once. The Space Crusade boards that had been my gateway to wargaming. The card and plastic terrain of Necromunda and second edition 40K (I still have a slightly scarred, yet usable Imperial Firebase). With only a limited amount of gaming partners during my teens, I spent considerably more time setting up and arranging these than I did actually playing games on them, and this has really tapped into that need of mine.

The system is straightforward, with you laying out (and connecting for stability) the 8″ square baseboards and then placing, or indeed stacking the rest of the terrain onto it in any configuration you can conjure up. Rather than you continuing to rely upon my ineloquent words though, watch this introductory video Battle Systems have made. It’s only three minutes long, so there’s no need to skip it out.

The uses for this Kickstarter are near endless, with it being suitable for more or less any Sci-Fi skirmish game thanks to the generic (yet far from bland) enviroment it creates. Warhammer 40K Kill Team and Zone Mortalis, Necromunda, Infinity, Deadzone, Sedition Wars and the new Alien V Predator game (article to follow) are the systems that instantly spring to my mind, but these are surely only scraping the surface. One of the reasons I invested in the Deadzone Kickstarter a few months back was the terrain and its multiple uses, yet I think this complements it, rather than competes with it, as it allows you to create a detailed interior environment, where Deadzone tends to lean more to external spaces. As i’ve received neither, I can’t comment on their compatibility, but it would be interesting to see if they can be combine, for instance to stage a break in that starts outside the complex and leads inside to an objective, and then perhaps a daring escape.

I’ve backed at the Stronghold level, which for £70 (or less if you can snag a vacated earlybird offer) gives you a 2ft square multi-levelled environment. Some games might require more space than this, but there are add-ons that allow you to buy extra tiles, walls and scenery, which I will probably do at a later date. As stretch goals have been reached Battle Systems have not only started adding more to the pledges, but have also started to create extra themed add-ons, such as a set of scenery for a medi-bay.

From the comments section on their KS, the guys at Battle Systems seemed to be an affable bunch, so we got in touch with them for an interview, which we will post up tomorrow as Part II. In the meantime, check out the links below to find out more about the company and the Kickstarter they are running.

Kickstarter
Battle Systems Website