"How many buildings for a 3 x 3 foot table?" Topic

I'm working on a 3x3 Mordheim table. Most of the buildings have a 4 or 5 inch footprint. I was thinking at first I'd go one building per 1 foot square of tabletop (9 buildings), but that seems a little sparse when I lay them out on the table. Anyone have a formula for this? Thanks,

Joe

I would probably want to have the buildings covering at least 1/4 of the surface area of the table. With houses of the size you have been planning for, that would probably require around 16 buildings.

When I used to play Mordheim on a regular basis, I'd put about 25 to 30 buildings/pieces of terrain of that size or bigger on a 4x4 table and that was about right for us. That's about 1.5 to 2 buildings per square foot. It all depends on how dense you want it. I will say that the less terrain you have shooting warbands will have an advantage. Also the narrower the streets the harder it is to gang up with big warbands. You should put your buildings close enough together and make sure you have some walkways between them so that you don't have too many islands of high terrain that are difficult to escape from. It makes for a more interesting game.

The more terrain the better. when I lay out my boards I try to keep the streets no wider than 6" and I use lots of buildings, fences, barricades, etc.

I medieval type town would be fairly narrow and the buildings stacked in. Also look at the map of Mordheim and you'll see ther are not a lot of big sparse areas.

Ideally, I'd say from two-thirds to three-quarters of your playing area should be covered by buildings or other terrain.

You often here people complain that shooting dominates Mordheim – which generally means they don't have enough terrain (although many people also mistakenly apply the melee rules for attacking knocked down an stunned enemies to ranged combat, which makes ranged combat more powerful than it was intended to be).

There is no real formula; it's what looks good to you and your opponents. Our tables tend to be a bit full (which is very nice) because we have a ton of terrain, and it'd be nice if every piece got its chance in the sun, as it were. I'd vary the footprint a lot, and if you're thinking of basing them, please remember to make the bases wide enough for a figure to stand right next to the building without falling off the base.

I prefer a cluttered table to a fairly clear one, but then, I prefer melee warbands to shooty ones.

I'm wrestling with the same dilema. I've just started a new Mordheim project from scratch. I'm building a 4x4 board but it's dawned on me I need a lot of ruins.

I'm building all the riuns myself from junk, to keep the costs down, which is good fun but time consuming. It's dawned on me that itsgoing to take me some time to build enough ruins to cover the table.

So go with what you have, and add some debris piles for more cover until you get enough ruins made.

Thanks, everyone, for the answers. I thought I'd be coming right back to this thread from a lake cabin vacation, but then found out there was no interwebs there :0. So instead I got to swim and fish and barbeque for a week instead. Bummer :)

Now I'm back and ready to get back to work on the table. I like the idea of using 6" wide streets, plenty of room for hands. I'll probably aim for about 20 buildings from reading your recommendations. I've got 6 done (or as done as you get, I like adding stuff to them later), a couple of big platforms, 4 half-timbered that just need the wooden beams painted, and another 4 that just have shells (no woodwork or floors). No I need to make at least another 6 buildings.

Thanks again for your help and it's good to be able to get back on TMP.

Luckyjoe

luckyjoe sounds great. Pictures would be nice, if you can, when your finished.

I have some photos of a recent Mordheim game I put on at my place here:

link

The table is fairly dense, but if it was even more dense it would be even more fun. I would really like to have a properly claustrophobic medieval city, but you're talking about a serious commitment in time and/or money to really fill a table up, though, even at 3x3. Luckily, a lot of my terrain does double duty with my WW2 games as well.

All of your terrain doesn't have to be fancy ruined buildings, either, you can create interesting situations with some fences / walls / stacks of barrels / vegetation / etc., and they are pretty cheap and fast to manufacture.