Terrain in a box

Last night I was browsing through various blogs and I happened to see the pictures of the tables from Adepticon. One of my dreams is to have a 'table in a box' setup, where I can simply carry a plastic crate into the club, open it up, and pull out everything I need to populate a table - cloth, area terrain and scatter. Looking at these tables, that's pretty much what Adepticon have done.

Picture stolen from TheBack40k.blogspot.com

Every table has six pieces of terrain - typically one or two buildings, two or three hills and two pieces of area terrain (such as woods, pillars or rocks). To that, I would add a selection of scatter - a mix of linear terrain such as walls or fences, craters and what-have-you. What I do like is that the area terrain has defined spots for the trees and whatever to sit in, and these are generically based on what looks like 60mm round bases. If I make the area terrain out of 3mm MDF, and glue a second layer of 2mm MDF on the top, with 65mm holes cut into it, that will give me good solid terrain, with removable features.

So... the next painting competition at the club (in May) is 'Terrain'. I reckon I can knock together a complete set for that if I make the effort. I think I will go for an ice and snow theme, for my Space Wolves, which means a white 6'x4' cloth, three white hills, two white areas with evergreen trees and a bunker. Add to that some linear pieces - maybe some of those barricades from the Aegis lines - and I'm sorted. Who knows, they may even be ready for my first game in the 40k tournament...