I was planning on just buying a gaming mat and some Deadzone terrain recently. After adding it up, I decided I may as well just buy the starter box and get more models/rule book/etc. One of the cool and unique aspects of Deadzone is the terrain. Instead of the board being divided into sections, it is instead divided into three dimensional cubes, each being 3″ x 3″ x 3″. The scenery is thus built this way. It is described as the Lego of terrain building and I think that is pretty spot on. If you have the scenery available, you could build really tall structures or massive multi-story compounds. The game rules are built around this concept in regards to movement, LOS, and range.

The construction of the terrain is designed to be broken down and built up in different ways. Since I plan on building more pieces and to keep from wearing out connectors and joints, I glued the terrain together to make it very durable. TIP: Cut the doors in half with a jewelers saw and use the extra support pieces to create even more barricades (see my pictures in the link below for some up-close shots). For painting, I used this tutorial (click here) as my base to save time. I used black primer, grey primer, and white primer, all from my local DIY store. Doing this cost me $8 is spray paint versus $30 in “hobby” spray paint. Since I don’t have a fancy vacuum hood and I sprayed the pieces in my garage on a drop cloth, I then washed the terrain in water just to get the dust off. After that, I hit all of the pieces with a very quick dry brush using white paint to help define the edges. I then picked out certain areas to paint with GW Averland Sunset, Warpaints Deep Blue, and Warpaints Greenskin. I then added some blood splaters/stains using GW Mechrite Red mixed with Warpaints Oak Brown. I tried to do some OSL with the lights, but I think i need to go back and brighten the source up a bit to make it look better. I washed some of the grating with GW Nuln Oil and created the blod spots with GW Agrax Earthshade. My painting was completed at this point but I wanted to make the pieces look very used and dirty so I went over all of them with Valejo Natural Umber pigment in certain areas. I sprayed the pieces with rubbing alcohol to set the pigment and then sealed the pieces with a clear matte spray. Finally, I went back over some of the blood stains with brush on Valejo Gloss Varnish to make the areas looks wet and sticky. This entire project took me approximately 12 hours. It is not show quality terrain, but for the time investment I am happy with the results.

I have several more pictures HERE in addition to the ones below. Questions? Comments? Please let me know, and thanks for stopping by. Next up? The Deadzone Enforcers I got with the game!