There’s another wave of Hextech pre-painted terrain from Gale Force 9 and Thunderhead Studio coming in January, expanding options for hills and trees, as well as a new set called The Sprawl – smaller two-level buildings that look dilapidated compared to the clean buildings from earlier releases. We’d like to thank GF9 for sending us copies of these sets for this review.

Autumn Woods

These are essentially the same woods they’ve previously released, only this time using red/orange colors to give an autumn feeling instead of the greens of summer. There are two styles of tree (a single tree and a cluster) and two colors, giving you some visual variety and a way to differentiate between light and heavy woods. There are 17 orange trees and 11 red, which I think is a little too close to equal – I’d prefer a couple more orange trees to use as light woods and a couple fewer red ones for the heavy woods, but it’s not a big deal. Each tree drops nicely into the bases, and while you can use them as-is they come with a set of magnets for you to glue into both tree and base, which will help keep them upright. I found that some of the single trees could be a little top heavy without the magnet, and prone to being knocked over.

The bases come in 2, 3, and 4-long lines and triangles that are also 2, 3 or 4 hexes on a side. The triangle bases are my only real complaint here, and even then only the biggest one. It’s large enough that moving a mech through it gets slowed down a lot, and I’d like a slightly more erratic shape rather than a triangle. Not a big deal though, and these are fantastic if you don’t have time to print and paint your own trees.

Hills

There’s really not a whole lot to say here, they’re hills. They look nice, have some level 2 areas on them, and the bottom is velvet to keep them in place during play. I think some texture on the top surfaces would be nice, but is far from critical, and these will end up being used regularly in my games to expand my hill options.

The Sprawl

I think these are the most useful of the new releases. There’s a one hex, four hex, and two different five hex building, all which are only two levels tall (and the larger buildings have areas that are only a single level). I’ve been using the printed versions of these buildings for as long as I’ve been using Hextech, they make perfect terrain for mechs to move around on, as you can actually climb them without jump jets or get partial cover from them.

Two of the buildings have the same style bases as both previous releases, which I talked about in our first review, and two of them have bases that match ones used for the print files. I think these bases are much better, easier to place the building on and I can actually mix these into the existing city setups I’ve built. I hope they’ll continue to use this style on future releases to help with the cross-compatibility.

I would like to see this set include a second one-hex building. I think it’s one of the most useful for building layouts, as it can be used very flexibly to block line of sight, and I tend to have more of them than any other building on my boards.

With this new release Hextech continues to be a solid choice for anyone looking to build out a collection of terrain to play Battletech with, especially if you don’t own a 3d printer of your own – and even if you do, the time savings from purchasing trees instead of printing and painting them is immense.

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