Acid House Terrain with MCP

End of last year I backed a Kickstarter for some Cyberpunk terrain that I thought would come in handy for use with Marvel: Crisis Protocol.

The terrain is by Acid House Terrain and its unique no glue, no paint, no clips, approach is what attracted me the most – I haven’t got the time to spend assembling and painting up terrain, I want to get to actually play games instead!

The terrain is made from high-density, plastified (which makes it water resistant), cardboard, which is highly detailed and rich in colour – it has a matt finish so it doesn’t reflect the light too much and that means you can easily see the detail and take some great pictures.

Well, just a few weeks ago, I received my pledge and over the Easter break managed to put it to use. I was eager to see how it looked on the table and whether it would transform our games of MCP.

To start, everything comes in a reasonably sized box, nice and easy to store, and is all folded flat. It’s then super easy to assemble the pieces of terrain you need for your game. Everything is colour coded and you simply select the correct insert to push into the building you want to erect, giving it rigidity and strength – these things are in no way floppy bits of card!

I bought this primarily for use with Marvel: Crisis Protocol and I was a little worried that the scale wouldn’t be quite right, though it does state on the box suitable for 28/35mm games, but we’ve all heard that before, right!

Once I’d put a 3′ x 3′ playing area together (it comes with terrain tiles) and filled it with a selection of buildings (by no means everything in the box), I was impressed by how good it looked, and it was time to add the characters and see how the scale compared.

I needn’t have worried. Nothing looked out of place and when playing the game it all felt just right. The only issue I came across in the three games we’ve played so far, is that it’s easy to fill the roof spaces up with things like signs and air-conditioning units and forget to leave any space for the larger based characters to stand – a minor issue that was all our fault, but it made for some interesting games.

Ah! And what games!

The three games we played were some of the best yet. Having a battlefield chocked full of terrain made a massive difference. Planning pincer moves around buildings, trying to gain line-of-sight, and constantly using cover to ones advantage, all made things much more tactical. The many smaller pieces, such as bus stops, barricades, dumpsters, and such like, led to games where more things were thrown and destroyed than all the previous games we’ve played put together.

With all the buildings crammed in it also meant that a lot more thought had to be put into roster choice. I played one game against Yasmin’s Web-Warriors and got trounced because most of my team couldn’t fly and didn’t have the wall-crawler ability. She managed to grab the Senator in the first turn (one of the objectives, which scored 2VP a round) and I couldn’t pin her down to get him back (how I’ve come to hate Black Cat!). My A-Team, though, did mash over half of hers into dust, I just couldn’t do it quickly enough!

In short, this terrain has transformed the game!

It’s easy and quick to change the battlefield between games. It’s sturdy enough to easily take the weight of the characters, it folds down and can be stored with your games on a shelf, and it’s cost effective too.

Oh! It also looks real cool too!

I’m now on the look out for other games to use the terrain with. Two suggestions so far have been Infinity and Judge Dredd – if you have any experience of these games the please drop your thoughts in the comments. Likewise, if you have any idea on what else would work with this Cyberpunk terrain, then I’d like to hear those too.