After seeing the Dockside Warehouse at AdeptiCon a few years ago in the Phalanx Consortium booth I knew I had to have one. Phalanx has been around for a while and attends most of the historical cons – they’re a great source of minis, tokens, and terrain. While most of the images here are from a Walking Dead game I had, this kit could definitely be used for a modern or cold war minis wargame.
The Warehouse kit is an MDF kit with some resin / metal parts. It comes in a huge box with a lot of different parts vacuum packed into labeled bags. I washed all the resin stuff and cleaned flash before I got those ready to go.
Phalanx is still working on instructions, however with a few FB messages I was able to put it all together no-problem. It is not a super complicated kit – just huge! You can see above the floor plates that hold the whole kit together.
The outside walls all go together, then you put the inside supports in. I feel like if you wanted to, you could leave the inside supports off and never use the roof for easier access to the inside of the building. I used mostly white glue for it unless there were parts that kept wanting to come undone – then I used super glue.
There are two end sections that are identical and one middle section to go between. You could definitely just use the two end sections if you wanted a smaller warehouse. There are magnets that are included so you can put the garage doors on and off easily. My resin doors chipped a little at the bottom when I cleaned flash, but I was able to file them down (with a mask on) and they’re fine.
The roof sections gave me some trouble, as a lot of roofs do for MDF buildings. Mostly just shaving down the sides a bit to make sure they slot in. Once I did that they’re fine. After you’ve painted you could add some sort of plastic for windows if you wanted.
Here you can see it from the end, and how the roof sits on the supports.
Each floor section has precut holes for the cement poles that keep drivers from hitting the building. The metal poles go in really easily and glue down.
Here’s the entire building assembled without the roof. You can see my tiny guy right in the middle for a sense of scale. The way I put it together, the buildings don’t go together 100% perfectly flush but I’m not bothered by it. MDF warps a bit and glue doesn’t always hold right at the same spot so it happens.
Here you can see it with all the garage doors installed. There are strips to go along the sides of the middle piece to cover the seams but again, I’m not bothered by it.
The part that took the longest was putting together all the crates and pallets included with the kit. I think there are probably 200 of each, and the crates are 6 pieces, the pallets 5. It took a while!
To be honest, I mostly just spray-painted the building. I sprayed the roof, garage doors, doors, and corner guards separately, then did three colors on the building itself (black, gray, tan for weathering). At some point I’ll do more weathering, graffiti, and shrubs growing up, but I have some other hobby projects to finish.
Here you can see it on a Walking Dead Call to Arms board (40 inches long by 20 inches wide) with the roof and stairs.
It’s pretty simple to get it finished the way I did. The doors for the office didn’t fit without a shim so I’m going to do that one later. You can see the cutouts where the shelves will go.
I sprayed the shelves gold (because I didn’t have any silver, and I thought gold would pop better vs the gray) and glued on the pallets and crates in a random configuration. Then I glued them down to the floor of the warehouse – otherwise they’ll fall over all the time. You could likely do some sort of magnetizing but I didn’t have time for that.
I made barricades by using extra crates and pallets. I didn’t spray either of these so they look just like bare wood. I also glued the two shelves together after this photo; a rubber band held them together really nicely while it set.
You can see here how functional the building is. I have pretty large hands and there were only a few times when it was hard for me to grab something inside. Adding the cars, supplies, models etc really makes the building alive (undead?).
I’m really glad I used clear bases with my TWD models as they go well with the gray cement base for the warehouse.
I didn’t glue the barricades down, so they can be put anywhere in the warehouse, including on top of the office where a sniper can cover his group members.
Overall I’m incredibly happy with how this turned out and I’m sure it’ll make a great convention game. Thanks for reading!
