writes:I wanted to start building up a collection of 15mm modern buildings, so I picked up the European Farm from the Battlefield in a Box range of scenics.
This box is amusingly misnamed, as it does not contain an entire farm; as it says elsewhere on the box, this is a European farmhouse. It comes well packed in foam inside the box, and is pre-painted.
The farmhouse consists of a single-storey home with attic, and an attached shed or garage. According to the box cover, the farmhouse is 5" long and 2¾ tall; by my measurement, the model building is 4¾" long, 2⅞" tall, and 3¼" wide.
The building has upper and lower parts. The doors and windows are modeled on the inside, but are painted black as are the interior walls. The floor has been given a plank texture and is painted brown; the brown color overlaps onto the interior walls. The exterior front door has a lumpy brown paint job, unlike the rest of the model.
The upper part provides the roof, attic windows, and chimney. The roof tiles are nicely textured with few errors (see the bottom right above for a mis-molded tile). (The tiles are also dust magnets, best cleaned with a soft brush.) The chimney is solid.
The underside of the top part (shown above) and the bottom part are painted black. The "lip" on the roof part fits inside the bottom part, making a loose fit with about ⅛" of wiggle room.
Curiously, there is nothing on the box or the online catalog about what the model is made from. Presumably resin.
As you can see in the picture above, the two building parts are not perfectly aligned. The 'attic' section overhangs the lower storey, and the edges are not parallel to each other.
At the back of the farmhouse, the attached shed or whatever it is has a wide wooden door, with no handle or indication if it is a single or double door. There are some casting errors on the roof part, where the brick sections meet, painted over and barely noticeable; there's also a splash of the tile color on the bricks, the only such error on our model.
I'm surprised that, since this model is part of the Team Yankee product line, there aren't any 'stats' provided. Based on p.28 of the main rulebook, the building would be handled as a upper and a lower room; the model is too short for the bottom floor to be considered two rooms. Troops can fire from windows and doors, which leads to interesting 'blind spots' from the back of the model. Presumably, the model holds as many troops as bases can fit inside (three medium bases will fit inside), and maybe two more bases in the attic (?), and common sense determines who shoots from which doors or windows.