Welcome to Baal Prime Part 1

My first ever flurry into terrain begins here.....

Recently, I have started to think more about the board I play on (or don’t play on lately as games are a bit scarce recently) as well as the armies I play.  Quite often the board you use is overlooked, you build your army as a primary goal and paint it as a secondary goal, however many people then get on their dining room table with some makeshift terrain or at a local gaming club/GW store with just the stuff they have available there.  Really, how many of you out there have your own game board that you use regularly and not someone else’s?

Posts like THIS one on 3++ got me thinking about how much terrain you use but also, maybe it’s time to start my own terrain project, beginning with a few bits and see how it goes from there, maybe eventually leading to a board of my own (99% likely to be the GW one as time taken and storage is of upmost importance).  So what board and terrain theme do you do? At a recent gaming tournament called blogwars I went to held at maelstromgames, I do believe if I remember right that all the boards were essentially the same, a sheet of grass with different buildings on top (apologies if there are different ones I did not see).

This seems fairly common on a lot of battle report pics and videos I see, maybe it’s just the easiest one to do, bit of sand and static grass here, bit of brown there.  I want something different.  To begin with I saw this and loved it –

However after extensive research, even though I would really love an ice board, it’s not all easy to do and models, unless their bases are snows as well don’t look right on it.  Plus the worst thing about them, they get dirty quite easily (Sheffield GW has a nice ice board but saw it recently and it looked extremely scruffy and needs re-flocking).

As such I went to plan B, my main army the chapter of Blood Angel’s home world of Baal.  There is a bit of fluff around about this place HERE that you can read, essentially its mainly the moons that people live on, but that isn’t going to stop me, I decided on the mars scape red look.

I searched the internet quite a bit, though only managed to find a small handful of red mars type boards, it’s very rare it seems for people to use this theme, certainly if anyone reads this that knows of a good blog with pics of mars boards or even better tutorials on mars terrain, I would be interested and grateful if you could link them in the comments.

This is the general look im going for -

To being with I started with the citadel craters set, here’s the first one complete –

These are actually a fair bit darker, the pictures actually make them look way more highlighted and orange than they actually are which is a shame, flash was off as well!  One day I will learn to take better pictures.

Once done, the rest were undercoated along with a battlescape I bought a while ago and a honoured Imperium I bought today.  Once complete next job will be to get some buildings, I think I will start with the Shrine of Aquilla.  So again, your homework is to find some other examples out there of mars type terrain and boards that I might not have found! More to come soon.