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  • How Do You Make Matched Play Terrain Look so Good? We Asked the Architects of Battlezone: Fronteris

How Do You Make Matched Play Terrain Look so Good? We Asked the Architects of Battlezone: Fronteris

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The rugged outposts of the Imperium’s border are fortified against rad-storms and raiders alike, and the result is some truly stunning new scenery for your games of Warhammer 40,000. The gorgeous Battlezone: Fronteris – Nachmund set goes up on pre-order this Saturday – it’s a battlefield in a box, loaded with characterful, detailed terrain and gaming boards your armies can fight over. Crack open War Zone Nachmund: Vigilus Alone to find terrain traits, narrative play abilities, and a new Theatre of War for these brutal frontier structures. 

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But the Fronteris terrain features don’t just add narrative flavour – they’re also carefully optimised for matched play. The designers looked at popular scenery sets* to inspire terrain that would provide an immersive experience for every style of game. To learn more about this balancing act, we snuck into the Warhammer Studio compound, and began interrogating the architects of the terrain team – Richard Butler, who helped conceive and plan it, and Dave Andrews, one of the designers.

Warhammer Community: What were your design priorities for Battlezone: Fronteris?

Richard Butler: We wanted to expand on the idea of frontier worlds, where brave colonists and foolhardy pioneers have set up Imperial outposts and settlements, surviving dangerous territories and climates. At the same time, we wanted to produce genuinely useful gaming terrain. 

Dave Andrews: We’re trying to create interesting, distinct environments to play games in. Fronteris is the Warhammer 40,000 equivalent of a Wild West town!

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Richard: In the past, much of our terrain focused on ruined buildings and grand shrines. Fronteris allowed us to explore something new – both in theme and function. The STC Hab-Bunkers are the core of Fronteris settlements – mass-produced, utilitarian living quarters designed to withstand any environment. The Auspex Shrine and Vox-Antenna provide communications, allowing plucky colonists to broadcast distress signals off-world. The modular Stockades keep out any hellish local fauna that roam the uncharted wastes, and the Fronteris Landing Pad is a logistical lifeline to the wider system.

Dave: The Fronteris Landing Pad is essentially a Warhammer 40,000 hill – it blocks line of sight, gives you an elevated position, and it looks cool and relates to the setting. Meanwhile, the Auspex Shrine and Vox-Antenna give it a purpose, a sense of function – if you've got a big radar dish, the nearby structures must surely house staff, maintenance supplies, or repair materials. It creates a more convincing environment, rather than feeling like two random huts in the middle of nowhere.

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WarCom: How do you create terrain that's well-suited to matched play and tournament use?

Richard: Creating terrain for Warhammer 40,000 is a balancing act. It's really important to produce beautiful and immersive scenery, but at the same time they need to be practical tools for a game. There are some subtle design elements incorporated with this in mind. For example, we designed the Fronteris Landing Pad to be just tall enough to fully block line of sight between two normal-sized infantry models on either side. 

The STC Hab-Bunkers are designed to be modular – you can stack one or both of them on top of the Fronteris Landing Pad to create a larger structure. At that size, you could hide a Redemptor Dreadnought, a Carnifex, or even a small tank behind the resulting building without worrying about being shot off the table!

The clear boundaries of each piece are another subtle design change – there should be no confusion as to where terrain begins and ends, so this design puts an end to classic conundrums about models putting a 'toe' in terrain. We’re thinking more and more about the kinds of matched play problems that terrain could solve in the future – Battlezone: Fronteris is just the tip of that iceberg. 

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WarCom: How do you feel about the final product?

Richard: I must have played dozens of games now on Fronteris terrain, and I feel really happy with the way it’s turned out. The clarity of structure, silhouette, and footprint really streamlines the gaming experience. Familiar questions of cover, line of sight, and positioning become straightforward. It's the best Warhammer 40,000 terrain yet.

WarCom: Any final thoughts?

Dave: I always like to see what people do with our terrain – like when hobbyists are chopping them up and converting them in ways I'd never thought of. It's not so long ago that if you wanted some scenery, you'd have to make it yourself out of bits of cardboard. These kits make it a lot more accessible, so it's always great to see people enjoying them.

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The events team is similarly excited – this terrain will soon begin to appear on competitive tables on the tournament scene, both at the upcoming US Open events and at Warhammer World itself. The set has a fantastic look and perfectly fits tournament table layouts. It’ll ensure that players have a consistent and fair terrain layout on more aesthetically diverse tables for all games at official Warhammer events.

Battlezone: Fronteris – Nachmund will be available to pre-order this weekend for all of your frontier world gaming needs. Make sure to activate your own Auspex Shrine by signing up for our newsletter to receive all the latest frontier headlines.

* Such as the classic Munitorum Armoured Containers, which are also modular and also have a clear silhouette and also block light of sight… starting to see a pattern?

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