As tables and terrain pieces vary in size and shape, it’s really up to you how you set yours up. This section provides guidelines on one way to set up a table.

Terrain Pieces

As a rule of thumb any terrain piece larger than 12” (15cm if playing in the smaller scale) should be counted as two pieces when using the terrain density table.

Common terrain pieces include:

Hills
Woods
Fields
Walls
Hedges
Towns (1–3 buildings)

Terrain Density

What you’re trying to achieve by placing terrain pieces is create a table with a good mix of movement and cover. Try to avoid too many long lines of sight that allow tanks and guns to fire at long range. Placing hills, woods, towns, hedges, etc towards the centre of the table forces units to manoeuvre in order to fire. Cover also provides protection for infantry and is ideal for deploying Hidden Units.

When setting up the table, it’s useful to think of how dense the terrain would be in the actual war theatre. The steppes of the Ukraine are open, making long range battles highly likely, but shift the battle to the Normandy bocage and you’re looking at a lot of close range action.

If you think in terms of terrain density, you’ll find it easy to set up the table. Three levels of density can be used:

Open Terrain
Mixed Terrain
Dense Terrain

Open Terrain: Russian steppes, the western desert.

Mixed Terrain: Lorraine, Britany, or any terrain that doesn’t fit into open or dense terrain.

Dense Terrain: Normandy bocage, Stalingrad (or any city battle), alpine regions, Caucasus Mountains, Apennine Mountains.

Once you’ve an idea of terrain density, either select the amount of terrain you want or roll 1D on the table below to find out how many pieces to place:

For example, the game is set in Lorraine, which is classed as Mixed Terrain. Max rolls a 4 which results in six terrain pieces.

Placing Terrain Guidelines

Some players like to take it in turns to choose and place a piece of terrain before the game starts. Others like set up the table beforehand – one player sets up the table – the other chooses which side is his Friendly Table Edge. Any objectives can be placed after the players decide on table edges. Defences and bunkers can then be marked on a rough sketch map of the battlefield.

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Starting a Game