When HGC won the Warmachine section of the VICCs a few weeks ago, we won terrain. Then the club which won Warhammer gave us their terrain on the grounds that they'd never get round to making it. (The VICCs always have terrain for the winning clubs which makes a lot of sense - except that HGC wins so often and has about the least need of terrain of any club in the state!)
In all, we ended up with a whole lot of CNC Workshop pre-cut MDF terrain kits, including their 'Sand Buildings' range. It seemed obvious to convert them into Menoth buildings for Warmachine and do a sort of review of CNC workshop's kit in the process.
First up, here's Grot with the build!
And there you have it!
Now I guess you are wondering what I thought of them right?
They look better than I was expecting - I've seen a few around which have obviously not been built well and had no effort put into cleaning up the pieces, or giving them a decent paint job. That said, I don't really think they are the easy option which they appear to be. Cutting the pieces away from the 'sprue' with clippers was quicker than using a saw, but left ugly stubs which had to be cleaned off. Each piece has at least four of these, even the steps, so it took a long time. All up, it took about 45 minutes to cut out, clean and assemble each of these buildings - longer than it'd take me with foamcore, even if I had to mark out the pieces.
The fit of the parts was good and solid, but at times too good and solid. I had to open up the slots with emery boards and files, and even ended up using a hammer to bash stair treads in.
Once built, they are very sturdy and look fairly good, obviously they look better after being detailed, and you need to put them on bases and fill the blank spaces behind the stairs or they look a bit silly.
I conclusion, the kits are a bit of a pain to build and rather time consuming BUT if you can't be bothered working out your own designs they do fit together very precisely so they could be the right solution for you. I know they're not the right solution for me because I prefer to work in Foamcore and like the freedom to build my own designs, but I will be making the rest of the kits that we won over the course of the next few months or so.
I give CNC Workshop Sand Building Kits:
Three out of five steam powered terrain whacking hammers for design, appearance and sturdiness (pretty indestructible, but a touch boring)
Two out of five steam powered terrain whacking hammers for ease and speed of construction. (a bit of a pain to build if I am honest)
Well, that about wraps it up - stay tuned for next ishoo when we FINALLY tackle something useful for all you WW2 players!
