With SAGA Summer in full swing, we’ve covered how to build, play and paint warbands. For everyone diving in to a new period – or if we’ve finally convinced you to pick up Historicals (welcome, it’s great isnt it?) – there’s one thing missing: Terrain. Enter Bandua, who don’t just provide fantastic 40k, Heresy and Kill Team terrain, but Historical terrain, tokens and rulers perfect for SAGA too!
Before digging into some of the Historical terrain on offer, let’s thank Bandua for sending it over for review! Links to each product reviewed are Goonhammer Affiliate links, so if you like what you see pick it up and support Goonhammer while you’re at it.Â
It’s SAGA Summer! Enjoy our coverage during the raiding season as we take a look at the factions, miniatures, and everything else you need to get started playing SAGA and earning massacre points.
Age of Saga Norse Farmstead
The Age of Saga Norse Farmstead is a solid little pack of terrain comprising two Viking style buildings and three stone walls. Assembly is lightning quick (less than five minutes to do all of it!), and the buildings look great. I’d seen the Bandua 40k stuff before (which looks very nice), but I was impressed to see the quality of printing for the wooden textures and thatched roofs – they look really great straight out of the packet, and it’d only be a little work with paint to cover up the few MDF edges that are still on show. Each piece of terrain is on it’s own “plate” of MDF, making construction simple, and roofs can be removed if you want to play with them as functional buildings.
SAGA is a pretty terrain-light game, with a functional minimum of three pieces of terrain in the standard Clash of Warlords setup. That means this pack could essentially sort all your requirements, working as two large ruins (or buildings, if you use the Book of Battles) and a field demarcated with the stone wall sections. As these are easy to make, simple to transport and look great right out of the box, you could potentially just head to a SAGA event with some flat pack MDF and have a table of terrain ready to go in a couple of minutes, which is glorious madness isn’t it?
With models around them they look absolutely fantastic, nicely scaled to 25/28mm and very “real”. For a start to a scenery collection for a new period (or a welcome to Historicals more generally!) I can’t hesitate to recommend them and I’m looking forward to getting some games in!
A True Viking
As this is Goonhammer Historicals, I wanted to comment on how realistic the terrain is. For me, convenience usually trumps accuracy, but from digging around (and a trip to the Jorvik Viking Centre – well worth it but significantly more expensive than the terrain!) the two building styles depicted are accurate enough. The overhang/lean to building is particularly good here, with the storage and occasional animal pen under a thatched or turf roof cropping up in a fair few archaeological contexts. It’d be nice to see a further version of this set with a turf printed roof, or expansions with larger longhouses and more imposing designs.
For this article, I’ve made all of these with only the very minimal cleanup required to get them together and left it at that so you can see exactly how everything looks. I’m keen to go back and give them a bit of additional detailing though, with textures of moss, scattered grass, bases, occasional geese and everything else you’d see in a living Viking settlement.
Crosses
Adding a little bit of extra character to your Viking table, the Crosses Pack comes with four Celtic-style crosses and one large later medieval village cross, making for excellent scatter terrain for Vikings in Britain or other once-Christian lands. These are simple three part pieces – two sides for each cross and a base – with a good amount of detail in the printing. The larger cross isn’t quite as nice as the three smaller ones, but they all look great and add a lot of character to a British or Irish themed board, especially alongside the Viking huts. I’d love to see Bandua take this kind of incidental Age of Vikings terrain further, with runestones and ogham printing in the same style.
2D Terrain
In learning about SAGA this summer I’ve found that a common event and tournament requirement is bringing your own terrain along with you – handily Bandua sent over their 2D terrain Mega Bundle Pack, comprising several ruins, woods, ponds, fields and stone walls you can use as ultra-portable terrain for Saga and any other games you might be playing. I’ve not really used 2D terrain before, so when I saw these I was pleasantly surprised – they’re well printed, clearly visible and highly robust, printed on non-slip fabric so they’ll stay in place during use. Even on my increasingly scarred and slippery dining room table, they were grippy enough for me to have to put effort into moving them, which bodes well for gameplay. While personally I’m not a 2D terrain person, if you want cheap, easy terrain in volume I’d definitely have a think about these.
Of all of the pieces, I think the fields will see most use for me – they’re perfect to set alongside (3D) wall pieces as ploughed fields, adding a lot of excellent looking area terrain that doesn’t need to be high relief.
Playing Tough
I haven’t had this stuff long enough to get hundreds of games in to test the robustness of the terrain. The 2D terrain will stand up for thousands of hours of play before it starts to fray, but it’s more difficult to test how strong the printed MDF stuff is. So, instead of pretending to test it or presuming it’ll last for ages, I gave the Viking Village to my 16 month old kid to throw around the room for a couple of hours. After it was picked up, thrown down, bashed about, used as drums, smashed into itself to make big noises, chucked overhand in the vague direction of an unbothered sleeping cat and everything else a toddler can throw at some terrain, there wasn’t a single scratch or burred edge. They still looked exactly as they did when I first made them. I think it’s pretty likely that if they can stand up to that, they can stand being used in games and stored for many years before wear and tear starts to show.
If you’re interested in picking up this terrain and want to support Goonhammer at the same time, hit the links above to get it via our affiliate link. If you’re still on the fence, or Vikings isn’t your period, stay tuned for our coverage of Bandua’s Medieval terrain coming soon!
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