Monday, March 9, 2015

MERCS Terrain - Cheap and Easy

If you look over my blog, I have an unhealthy amount of terrain which I intended for use with both MERCS and Infinity. Infinity is hugely popular sci-fi skirmish wargame, that requires a lot of terrain on a 4'x4' table.
Over on my other non-MERCS blog, I did a post on Infinity Terrain - Cheap and Easy. From that post, my '$14 and one morning of labour' solution probably created enough terrain to cover a MERCS table - but here's an even cheaper, easier solution that looks a whole lot better!

With the launch of Infinity N3, Covus Belli have released the Moto.tronic Scenery Pack, which gives MERCS palyers a very strong option for an entire MERCS table for only $12.50 that includes:
  • 1 Game Mat, 24"x34"
  • 4 Buildings
  • 6 Cargo Containers

So, the game mat is just shy of the standard 2'x3' MERCS board, but if you adjust the deployment rules for MERCS:
  • each model must deploy with it's base touching the board edge
that should mitigate the missing inch on each side well enough.
The cardboard buildings and cargo containers are obviously not as sturdy as the other MDF terrain pieces I have, but taking a total of 10 minutes to assemble and looking fantastic right out of the pack, I'm not going to complain!

An element that is missing from this set is half-cover scatter terrain. There are lots of products that you could use that would fit in well with this MERCS table (I plan on using my Deadzone scatter terrain), and there are also heaps of DIY options if you want to keep it on the cheap.

There are a bunch of reviews for this product online already, but here are some of my photos:


Construction is really straight forward, but it's nice
instructions are provided anyway

Three of the six cargo containers (two of each design in the pack)

Two of the four buildings (two of each design in the pack)

Game mat!

Assembled building and cargo container



Game mat folded up, with buildings and containers stacked for easy storage

Sync out.