Terrain Review: Kaldstrom Scenery Pack

A couple of weeks ago, I saw images of the Kaldstrom scenery pack and it quickly peaked my interest.  I purchased one of the original Corvus Belli scenery packs, the Kurage Station scenery pack, and it wasn't bad.  The Kurage Station pack is made up of basically flattened, pre-printed boxes that you fold out into some buildings, storage containers, and walkways.  It was dirt cheap and not bad as far as quality, but it lacked any weight.  Knock the table just right and I was worried about minis going flying so I didn't use it that often.  With the Kaldstrom pack, Corvus Belli has gone in a different direction and in my opinion the end result isn't bad for what you get.

Unlike the Kurage Station pack, the Kaldstrom pack is made out of a very thick cardboard.  Think Battle Systems terrain and you are close, but I think this material is actually a bit thicker.  Printed on both sides, it is designed to give you different options when you assemble them, plus you can take them apart, flip the parts over, and instantly have some different terrain.  Not a bad concept in theory, but in practice?  Not so much.

Where the Battle Systems terrain has a finish on them, the Corvus Belli terrain doesn't which makes it a little more delicate when are assembling it.  Since this is all done with slots and tabs, you do need to be careful as you assemble it otherwise the board quickly start to breakdown and the layers break apart.  The instructions also aren't very clear as there isn't a suggested order of assembly to put it all together without having to resort to a bit of brute force.  To be clear, I was able to assemble all of the terrain pieces once without any serious issues but there is no way I'm going to take them back apart.

The resulting buildings are very solid and I think they could easily support the weight of even a good sized metal mini with no issue.  They also come in two different sizes so you can actually stack one of the smaller ones on top of a larger one to give yourself another story.

The set also comes with a good number of barriers, holoads, and display boards, giving you a nice mix of scatter terrain.  These bits were a big reason that I decided to bite the bullet and give it a go, as I can easily incorporate these parts into something like Core Space for some different cover options.  There are also a good number of tokens for use with Infinity but you can easily find ways to corporate them into other games as well.  The most numerous are order tokens which I can see being used as blips like in Space Hulk.

Overall, I like this set and I can see it getting use in the future.  I was looking for a cheap alternative to scratch built terrain and I think that this fits the bill.  Perhaps not the most varied of terrains but it was ready to go pretty quickly so that works for me, and as you can see from the pictures, it doesn't look half bad with some other terrain to mix things up.

There is also an expansion pack that includes two more small buildings, a much larger open topped building they list as "an objective room", some bridges and ladders, and even a sniper tower.  This one is currently on order, but with these two sets I'm thinking I should be able to get decent coverage for a 4' x 3' table which is the biggest I'd be playing solo on.

So the final verdict?  I don't think it's a bad value for the money.  Retailing at $36 each, I managed to get both for just over $50 which I don't think is too bad a price.  The pieces are double sided so in theory you can rebuild them to have a different facade, but I think that the wear and tear on the edges of the material would quickly make them impossible to get together.  Could I make something similar myself?  Absolutely, but then again when you figure in the materials and more importantly the time to do it, I think I came out ahead in this situation.  This doesn't mean that I'm going to stop making terrain, but it's good to have an option for some terrain that I can just grab and throw onto the table.  Until next time...