I just got a bunch of Monopoly City buildings in the mail, bought off of Boardgame Geek's market. I'd seen the wonderful city pieces produced by Fen Edge Wargaming for his dieselpunk air combat games and I wanted something similar for my 3mm sci-fi set up. Turns out that Warren Colegrave was selling his copy of the Monopoly City on the 'Geek for a very reasonable price. Mr. Colgrave lives in Canada, but he very politely agreed to sell me only the building pieces and to send them to me in a cushioned envelope in order to avoid customs.
Two weeks later they arrived in Brazil and I got started painting.
The pieces from Monopoly City are all different scales and sizes, but they work well together and with old-style Monopoly houses and hotels, as well as the Microform white metal buildings in 1/900 scale that Ana Paula gave me for Christmas 2010.
I've mounted them all on plasticard and the resulting blocks can be combined in any number of different ways to make cities, towns and even villages.
Here are some quick photos of everything I've built so far, all laid out along with some roads. The roads have not been pinned down to the table, as they should be, so they look a little sloppy. Also sloppy is the camera work, which is certainly not as crisp as it could be. I plan to take some more, better pictures, soon.
These buildings have been put together over the past 7 years, a bit at a time (excpet for the newly acquired Monopoly City pieces which were all done in a week). In spite of the varying scales and the fact that some of the buildings have windows painted on while others are more abstract, everything hangs together quite well, I think.
The first shot shows Picoburg before I laid down the roads, suburbs and airport. In the upper left- and lower right-hand corners, you can see the industrial districts that are made completely of MC pieces, as are the downtown highrises and the apartment complexes on the edge of town.
To the left is Olde Towne, the historical city center, with cobbled streets, the cathedral and a medieval city block made out of PicoArmor's Monopoly buildings. The low-rise housing complexes are simple wooden blocks covered in cardboard and gussied up with balsa bits and plasticard. You can also see some Microform buildings in the block just south of the business district.
Here's a shot of the city from the suburbs and surrounding farmland. The airport and roads have also gone int. Most of these village pieces are made out of a combination of Monopoly buildings: some PicoArmor and some wooden pieces picked up on Ebay. The airport is scratchbuilt.
Roads are painted and textured artist's canvas. They should be pinned down and look better when they are. Here, they're just thrown down and it shows.
And finally here's an aerial shot of most of the city, some farms and a suburb.
I really must appologize for the crap quality of these photos!
The next project is Picoburg Federal Univerity (home of the "fighting Pixels").
On my "to buy" list now are Brigade Games wonderful 1/900 (2mm) pieces (which can be seen here at PicoArmor). I plan to put these down on their own blocks, so that they can be used seperately from the pieces shown here. I think they'll look just fine together, however.
I hope this shows you that a wide variety of materials can be used, almost indiscriminantly and without much care for "proper" scale. Here we have pieces that go from 1/700 to 1/1200, but the overall effect is quite acceptable. Of course, some care must be taken when composing blocks and even moreso when putting blocks together in cities, but still…
So the answer to the question of "What buildings should I buy?" is "All of them". You should strive to have a wide variety of pieces available which you can mix and match as the mood takes you (or as period demands).
The best, most beautiful pico terrain pieces out there are by Angel Barracks (3mm English early 20th century town) and Rod Langton (about 1.5mm for Napoleonics). AB's village will set you back 30 quid, however, while Langton's town hall alone costs five pounds!
The entire MC set cost me 25 CDN (and that includes shipping). It came with 6 skyscrapes, 8 office buildings, 8 high-rise apartment blocks, 16 houses, 3 prisons, 3 nuke reactors, 3 garbage dumps, 3 football stadiums, 16 small factories, 3 waste treatment plants and 3 windmills.
There's also Irregular Miniatures 2mm stuff (which is closer to 1/1200 scale, actually). I love IM and they will always have a fond spot in my heart for introducing picoscale gaming to me. I have to admit, however, that their terrain is simply not up to the current standard, however. Nor does it mix very well with the other lines noted above.
Finally, if you want to go with some 3mm American Civil War stuff, there's the old Simply 6 line, now defunct, but sold by Pico Armor and Peter Pig's 3mm Hammerin' Iron line, which I hear is quite good.
I hope this gives prospective 3mm players an idea of what's available and what can be done. Meanwhile, you can take a look at Steel On Sand's wonderful comparison shots of some popular 3mm terrain lines. When one uses all these pieces together, en mass, the difference between 1/1200 and 1/600 really doesn't show. If you're only going to be using a few buildings, however, it's probably better to make these all one line or a couple of easily matched lines.
("Lead Doesn't Bleed" blog has this report with all the appropriate hotlinks: link
