The best Warhammer terrain for any budget

Battlefield in a Box does exactly what its name suggests: you open the box, and pull out a new piece of terrain for your battlefield. The range covers many common wargame themes, from fantasy and historical to the grim darkness of the far future, with components ranging from rivers to hills to ruins and craters.

The models are made from a variety of materials, with the largest parts made from weighty resin. Buildings are painted to a basic standard, which is usable right out of the box but looks even better if you have the time to give it another quick highlight.

The Dark Fantastic Mills range is about as gorgeous as wargaming terrain gets without being handcrafted by an artisan. It leans heavily into fantasy and sci-fi themes, from lost Dwarfen Mountain Holds, to Chaos Citadels, to floating sky platforms. The scenery looks amazing, but it’s all been designed with gaming in mind, so the detail never gets in the way of offering flat surfaces to place your models.

The terrain is 3D printed using high-resolution FDM printers by the company: a few of the themes are available to buy as STL files for home 3D printing.

FutureProof Modular Terrain isn’t generally available yet, having just crowdfunded earlier in 2024, but we’re including it because we were so impressed with the review samples we were sent.

This is a terrain system that clips together as easy as a Lego set, producing sturdy, gameable, multi-storey ruins. Then, when you’re tired with a design – or the rules of your favorite game change so you need a different terrain layout – you can break the model down and rebuild it.

The range has a single aesthetic, but there’s nothing connecting it to a particular technology level, and it will work well for gothic sci-fi, mid-century urban decay, post-apocalypse, and some flavors of fantasy. We found it quick and easy to spray paint the components, add a few details with a brush, and produce great tabletop-standard scenery.

The Dungeons and Lasers range is, at its core, a modular system for building dungeons. The range includes fantasy, sci-fi, and horror themes, and as well as dungeon tiles there are city streets, fantasy buildings, caves, sewers, and more. There’s plenty of textured detail that makes this terrain easy to paint with a base coat and drybrushing.

The system uses clips to hold floor tiles together, and a simple peg and hole system to attach walls to floors. The kit pictured uses half height walls to make it easier to see exactly where models are, while full-height walls can support additional floors or roof pieces.

If you want to build multi-level structures you will need to glue together your floors, but if you’re happy with a single level you can keep the tiles unglued and fully modular.

Amera Plastic Mouldings terrain is made from vacuum formed polystyrene sheet, and it’s very cheap. Products include trenches, sci-fi and fantasy buildings and ruins, industrial pipes, hills, and even a star fort.

The vacuum forming process (in which a sheet of heated plastic is sucked down by a vacuum so it fits tightly to the surface of a master model) means that the detail on these kits is a little soft. But they make a great canvas for you to add extra details to with hobby materials.

Tabletop Scenics is a huge and continually growing range of cheap MDF kits. They offer a good level of detail for the price, while generally not requiring a huge amount of effort to construct.

The range includes sci-fi, fantasy, and historical scenery, small scale terrain as well as 28mm, and game-specific designs such as the modular sci-fi mazes you need to play Horus Heresy or Necromunda Zone Mortalis scenarios.

The one area where the low price harms these kits is in precision. There is often a little bit of give or flexibility in how two pieces of a kit go together. This isn’t an issue for individual kits, but if you’re building a modular system this will occasionally result in components not tessellating perfectly when they should. You can mitigate this by taking extra care when building the models.

Blacksite Studio makes a range of gorgeous, prepainted MDF kits covering a wide range of themes. It has an excellent range of contemporary environments perfect for modern, historical, fantasy, sci-fi, and post-apocalyptic wargames, including an amazing (off-brand) modular Fallout vault.

The sheer quality of these kits is almost a downside. Some kits, particularly ruined buildings, contain multiple small and delicate MDF components that are easy to break during construction, let alone gameplay. To make the kits look their absolute best you need to be very careful when assembling them to prevent glue smearing and spoiling the paint job.

TeraFormers is an MDF-based modular board system. Unlike most modular boards, which provide flat tiles held together by clips, TerraFormers is all about depth. Each of its kits makes a 2” deep, 1’ square MDF frame which you fill with lightweight expanded polystyrene. The kits come with magnets that sit neatly into pre-drilled holes in the frames, so you can connect your tiles together seamlessly.

With 2” of polystyrene to carve into, you can create pools and craters in the middle of basic tiles – but specially designed frame pieces give you many more options. Sloping and raised edges allow you to create hills, cliffs, interior caves, and beaches.

Most frames have optional cut-outs in the top edge. This give you entry and exit points for paths, roads, rivers, streams, and trenches, so you can be certain that these terrain features will align perfectly from one tile to the next. Using these tiles to create a full board is a huge hobby project, but you can do it one tile at a time and work up from a skirmish board to a full battlefield.