How Do I… Use Urban Terrain
When laying out terrain on the tabletop battlefield, most forms of terrain are pretty easy and obvious to fit within the context of the Combat Cards. Woods are typically a Template of Covering Terrain, swamps are Templates of Hindering Terrain, hedges are Linear Obstructing Terrain and so on. The one form of terrain that often gives players fits is the dreaded ‘built up’ or ‘urban’ areas (e.g. cities, towns, villages and buildings).
Should urban areas be Templates of Impassable terrain? Or should each wall of a building be Linear Covering Terrain? Should roads be Clear Open Terrain, or should the walls and hedges that often run along them force them to be Obstructing Terrain? As players will play a host of different scales, genres and battlefield sizes there really isn’t a single authoritative answer to the question. What follows are some ideas which have proven effective in different types of games. Hopefully one them, or some combination of them, will help you lay out a better battlefield for your games.
If your battlefield is going to have large swaths of urban or built-up areas, then simply setting the areas up as Templates of Covering Terrain is probably the easiest way to lay it out. Just place a few terrain pieces (e.g. houses, walls, gardens, etc.) on the template to make it clear what the terrain represents – just like you would with a woods or forest template. All the rules for fighting and maneuvering in and around the Covering Terrain would then apply as normal. This method requires the least amount of set-up work and provides the most streamlined approach to handling built-up areas.
Another possibility for setting up urban areas on the battlefield is to make each specific built-up terrain feature, such as an individual house or estate, orchard, etc., a template unto itself. The areas between the terrain features can then be left as Clear Open Terrain. In this case, the rules for fighting and maneuvering in and around Covering Terrain would apply only when units interact with the specific urban terrain feature, instead coming into play simply when they enter the built-up area. This method works best when there few built-up terrain features on the battlefield, or when scenario parameters call for a more detailed assessment of the features (e.g. the battle revolves around a certain terrain feature, or individual features determine victory conditions, or are worth certain victory points, etc.).
Finally, if there is almost no built-up/urban terrain on the battlefield, or the scale of miniatures are sufficiently large enough to warrant a very detailed treatment of the terrain, terrain features can be broken down into their constituent parts and their effect on the battlefield determined that way. For example, if there is only a single house with a fence and gate on the battlefield, the gate and fence could be labeled as Linear Covering Terrain, along with each wall of the house. The interior of the house could then be labeled Open Clear Terrain, unless a room contained a lot of furniture or other obstructions. In that case the room could be marked as a Covering Terrain Template between the walls. This method, while providing the most detailed representation of terrain on the battlefield, does require a more sophisticated method for tracking the terrain classification of each terrain feature (or part of a feature).
If your are feeling very ambitious, or would like a little greater detail in the urban areas, the built-up terrain templates on one battlefield could actually be set up as separate (concurrent) battlefields. With a larger area to lay them out, the terrain they contain could then be subdivided into smaller features using some combination of the other methods discussed above. When a unit moved into the built-up template on the main battlefield, it would be transferred to the sub-battlefield for a more detailed conduct of the battle in that area. This would mean that on their turn, players would simply play their cards either on the main table or one of the smaller urban tables (but not both; only on one battlefield per turn may a player play their cards – this will be covered in more depth in an expansion for larger games with multiple sectors) using the terrain rules as they apply on each of the respective battlefields. Only when units move to the boundary of the template (allowing Line of Sight to be drawn to and from them on the main battlefield) would they be again marked on the main battlefield. While requiring a little more work in the initial set-up, this approach definitely offers a lot of exciting possibilities for a more detailed approach to handing built-up areas within the context of a bigger game.
In any event, give some of these ideas a try in futures games and so how they work for you. Hopefully you will find something that really meet your needs and fits your style of play.
